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www.dcvelocity.com SEPTEMBER 2019 DC VELOCITY 49
cent) of respondents said they engage in
this practice.
Giving carriers more leadtime can
also raise tender-acceptance rates. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said they
give carriers two days or less to accept a
load—a tight timetable that may inhibit
fleets’ ability to take on that business.
By contrast, 11 percent of respondents
reported giving carriers six days or longer before a load needed to be picked up.
Another way to improve carrier relations is to help fleets keep their trucks
on the road, rather than sitting in warehouse yards or at loading docks. Some
carriers charge detention fees for long
waits, but avoiding the delay in the first
place is a better solution. Most shippers
in the survey said they are efficient at
turning trucks in their yards, with only
9 percent of carriers being held up more
than four hours at origin facilities and
just 8 percent at destination facilities.
Consistency in such areas as dwell
times helps carriers avoid unanticipated delays and stick to their schedules.
Respondents reported that they are
doing well in this regard, with 86 percent saying their dwell times were fairly
consistent at origin facilities and 77
percent saying the same for destination
facilities.
Shippers of choice build strategic partnerships with their carriers. One way to
do that is by inviting carriers to participate in joint business reviews on topics
like improving processes or boosting
profitability. Among respondents who
follow this practice, quarterly reviews
are most common (cited by 38 percent),
followed by biannual reviews ( 29 percent), annual reviews ( 27 percent), and
monthly reviews ( 6 percent).
But being a shipper of choice is not
just about helping to ensure carriers can
make a fair profit on their loads; it’s also
about how shippers treat the carriers’
drivers, Banker says. One often-cited
measure of driver treatment is whether
they’re given access to bathrooms—that
is, whether shippers allow drivers to
use the restrooms at their facilities after
long drives. There is plenty of room for
improvement in this particular area: 21
percent of respondents reported that
less than 25 percent of their des-
tination facilities make restrooms
available to drivers.
MANY ROUTES TO CUTTING
COSTS
All that is not to say that shippers
have stopped focusing on freight
costs; in fact, freight rates are as
important as ever. In their constant
struggle to cut those costs, shippers
often turn to benchmarking their
routes—comparing their own rates
with those for similar shipments and
using that information as a bar-
gaining tool. Eighty-two percent of
