materialhandlingupdate CUBING AND WEIGHING used to determine how to best fill the truck. That’s good business practice, says Chuck Clowdis, managing director for transportation advisory and consulting services at IHS Global Insight, an indus- try research and consulting firm. “You don’t want to leave holes in trailers,” he says. “The idea is to fill the trailer. The higher and tighter you can stack a trailer, the better. Tighter stacking can also reduce product damage.” “Dimensioning helps you to better understand your freight,” adds David Ross, managing director and transporta- tion analyst for investment firm Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. “Understanding your dimensions allows you to redesign pack- aging to save money. You can also build pallets in a different way to save space in the truck.”
the time of order. Lowther says that
Interline will be using the data it captures
on its products to roll out a new program
in the first quarter of 2013 that will pro-
vide accurate freight charges, enhancing
the overall customer experience.
A BETTER CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Another company that’s using cubing
data for a variety of applications is
Interline Brands, a Jacksonville, Fla.-based supplier of maintenance, repair,
and operations products. These products,
which include parts for janitorial and
plumbing needs, HVAC equipment, and
industrial tools, vary greatly in weight and
size. Items are shipped from 54 warehouses in North America. Four large replenishment centers feed the warehouses, and
six CubiScans perform dimensioning
within the system.
“We capture sizes at receiving and use
the information [in many different
ways],” says Scott Lowther, Interline’s vendor compliance manager. These include
slotting within the warehouses and determining other space needs in both new
and existing facilities.
The dimensional data are also used for
shipping. Although it relies on parcel and
LTL service for shipments to customers,
Interline has its own fleet of trucks to
handle much of the hauling between its
facilities.
“We want to ship as little air as possible,
so filling the trucks to capacity is to our
advantage and is most cost-effective,” says
Lowther.
He adds that customers also want to
know what their freight charges will be at
WORKING WITH CARRIERS
As valuable as weight and dimensional
data may be for internal shipping purposes, the story doesn’t end there. Having
accurate numbers can also prove helpful
when shippers go to deal with for-hire
LTL and parcel carriers.
One example would be a case involving a
dispute over freight charges. “If there is a
challenge on a shipping charge, we have
full documentation on that product’s
weight and dimensions,” says Entrikin of
Monoprice. Such challenges, he adds, used
to be more common when the company
relied on manual measurements, but rarely
occur now because the information supplied to carriers is much more accurate.
And then there’s the matter of building
better relations with carriers. Although
parcel carriers tend to be more exacting
when it comes to a package’s weight and
dimensions, LTL carriers often rely on
data provided by the shipper to determine freight charges. That’s largely a
matter of expedience: Most truckers are
focused on keeping freight moving
through the network and don’t want to
slow down processes to weigh and measure freight.
“Carriers don’t have the time to dimen-
sion every load,” says Clowdis of IHS
Global Insight. “But if they see something
that looks funky, they weigh and inspect
it.”
That’s where dimensioning data comes
in. “If you have accurate info on your
products, it just makes it easier for the
carrier,” explains Michael Regan of
TranzAct Technologies.
Ross of Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. adds that
making life easier for the carrier can have
a long-term payoff. “If the shipper has
better info on its products, it may be able
to get a better price and build a better
relationship with the carrier,” he says. ;
