Other brokers use a spreadsheet to follow trucks, pay for services, and bill customers, Herman says, but Mike’s Loading Service uses the McLeod transportation management system which will set up, track, and monitor a carrier’s status related to safety ratings and scores, payments, insurance, interstate and intrastate authority, as well as provide a
real-time carrier base.
“It is really important to have an ongoing evaluation of how the carrier is doing with professionalism and reliability,” Lund says. Similar to commerce sites like eBay and Amazon, “we rank the driver and the carrier on every load. We’re building a history and internal information about that carrier.”
Lund also employs LocusTraxx to track loads in real time, which has been very successful. “We monitor the documents, monitor the company, monitor how they are doing every which way we can. But it is difficult, it’s hard—you have to do it every day, all day long, every load, a thousand loads a day. There are no shortcuts to good monitoring.”
Summing Up: “You Get What You Pay For”
“The reality is, if you’re going to be in this business and you’re going to do it right, whether it’s exempt or regulated freight, you need to follow steps to protect yourself,” Herman concludes.
The bottom line, Herman emphasizes, is about protecting your company “on the big scale. We all know the product is worth a certain amount of money, but the product is finite, it doesn’t have ‘pain and suffering’. If you have $60,000 of cargo on the truck, then the loss is going to be $60,000 at the most.”
There are, unfortunately, far worse scenarios to deal with, like an accident. “If six people get killed, and it was because you hired a truck that was negligent or didn’t have authority or proper documents,” Herman continues, “you could be paying $6 to $8 million per death. That will put you out of business real quick. So this whole exercise is for protection of your company as much as protection of your product,” he says.
At Pearce Worldwide, the due diligence program is “burdensome, costly, but very productive and very successful,” says Strickland. “It saves us on every front. It gives us trucks that are qualified to do the job, and they run at far less of a risk of being taken out of service while en route with our cargo. It goes right back to the same thing: you get what you pay for.”
