Key Services to Look for In a Heavy Equipment Transport Company

If you need to ship heavy equipments, you need to look for heavy equipment transport companies that can meet your needs. There is a huge difference in shipping ordinary goods and shipping heavy equipments. The customers who do not understand this difference will likely incur losses, by failing to choose the right company that ensures safety of their heavy equipments.

Planning process

Careful planning is the first thing you need to do. It means you need to take into account the weight and measure of the equipments that need to be shipped. In addition, the right heavy equipment transport companies must ensure the safety of your equipments through each leg of the journey. It may include land, air, and sea routes which can be mapped in advance. The time through each leg must also be noted and the company should be able to take an alternate route, if needed.

RO-RO

Find out if your company offers RO-RO service. Heavy equipment transport companies that offer this service are ideally suited for your needs. If your company offers RO-RO service, it means they offer you roll on and roll off operations. This option ensures that your heavy equipments can be transported on as well as off using wheels installed by the manufacturer. This service will be useful because of its convenience and safety.

Insurance and other documents

One of the most critical things that every heavy equipment transport company must offer its clients is insurance of goods that need to be transported. The company’s policy must take into account environmental issues, transportation in all forms, and various other factors pertinent to heavy equipment shipping. The company should have all necessary documents in context of oversized loads, routes, and other necessary permits required. On your part, you also need to ensure that your own policy documents are right.

Specialized equipment

For the safety of your heavy equipments, you need to ensure that your transport company has all necessary equipments to handle them. Many heavy equipment transport companies have the necessary equipment, yet it needs to be ensured. Blade guards, specialized trails, and hooks apart from options for scraper, terex, and CAT are the things your transporter must be equipped with. In addition, if your heavy equipments are sensitive, they need to be handled carefully.

Dismantling and reassembling

There are many heavy equipment transport companies in the industry, but not all of them provide the same level of service. Ensure before finalizing the company, the manner in which they will handle your heavy equipments. If the company tells you they will dismantle your heavy equipments and then reassemble them, try to avoid this service. On the other hand, you must look for heavy equipment transport companies that will promise to ship your equipments without dismantling them. This way, you will not only save time, but also ensure that the equipments will be in the same condition as they were when they were hauled for shipping.

It is evident that not all heavy equipment transport companies are alike. While some offer excellent level of service ensuring safe and timely delivery of your heavy equipments, others may lack the excellence. So, it is critical to take into account important factors before choosing a company.

Choosing the Right Heavy Freight Services – Things to Consider

When you have heavy and bulky items like production material and vehicles to ship, it is critical that you choose reputed heavy freight shipping services. It is important to ensure that your cargo is safe during the course of shipping and reaches on time. The right company ensures that your cargo reaches safely and in time.

Heavy freight shipping options

Heavy freight shipping companies transport cargo safely to the location you want. The shipping may involve a number of methods such as cargo ships, trucks, freight trains, and airplanes, or a combination of them. The shipping options available with you are road, railway, sea, and air. You may choose either one or more of these in combination depending on your logistics needs.

Shipping through road is suitable when goods can be accommodated in large trucks. Here, convenience and not time is an important consideration. Railways are ideal for heavy freight shipping when cargo items are huge and time is an important consideration. Generally farm supplies, vehicles, and manufacturing goods are shipped using this method.

Ships are the most cost effective method of transportation but it takes time to ship an item. Generally heavy machinery, industrial goods, vehicles, and large merchandise are shipped through shipping. Heavy freight shipping using airplanes is costly but it saves time. It becomes a necessity when road routes are blocked.

Look for the right equipment

The first thing you need to check, when choosing a heavy freight shipping company to move your goods and supplies, is whether they have the right equipment to handle the goods and supplies you want to move. If you want to ship perishable food items or hazardous chemicals, then the items need to be handled carefully.

While some heavy freight shipping companies do not have equipments to handle these risky items, others are ill-equipped. But there are some companies that have the right equipments, so you need to ensure in advance that the company you have chosen will take care of your items that need to be cared.

Reputation matters

The reputation of a heavy freight shipping company matters. So, you must take time to do some background check into their past record. If you choose a reliable company it will give you peace of mind. They must not only be honest and reliable but must have a minimal level of damage history during transportation.

If the company provides a list of previous clients, which every honest company should, you will have at least the chance to verify their reputation. Ideally, a reputable and honest heavy freight shipping company will provide you with the facility of instant tracking. Additionally, there is no point in doing business with a company that does not provide 24×7 customer support.

Getting the best rates

If you are looking for the right company that can give you the best rates, you shouldn’t fix a deal with the very first company you come across. You need to compare prices of different heavy freight shipping companies. The comparison will give you some idea about the services offered and prices for the same.

You can even find the prices on the company’s website. If you decide to take help of a freight broker’s services, they may be able to find a service for you at an affordable price. However, it is better to do some research yourself into heavy freight shipping companies as you want the top service at the least price.

Trucking Industry Trends For 2013

Truckload carriers consistently innovate to keep their business profitable, especially through driver retention and service diversification. Carriers are diversifying the business options with bigger margin services, which include logistics, brokerage, intermodal services, dedicated services, specialized hauling, and LTL to TL consolidation. Major truckload carriers who are looking to diversify are doing so in dedicated services and brokerage services. Mentioned below are findings of surveys which point to the existing factors at play in the trucking industry.

Driver retention

The primary factor for driver retention is driver miles. Utilization and turnover are tied directly to the pay miles of the driver. The turnover rates very closely follow the revenue mile in every week of a driver. Organizations with the most number of driver logs are usually the ones with very low rates of turnover. This indicates that as utilization increases, the turnover decreases. Trucks sitting around in a garage can affect the overall retention and driver morale, apart from the financial performance of the company. While the home time may be an important factor, to be constantly productive drivers should spend that time away from home.

Downtime

The fleet downtime has continued to pose challenges for companies. In surveys, it has been reported that almost 6% of tractor fleets in companies have not been up and running in the past year. This is quite alarming, as anything above 5% is generally considered to be unacceptable. Also, the mean life of truck fleets is pegged at 44 months, which is more than what is ideal. This has resulted in more unscheduled breakdowns, which negatively affects the asset utilization. Specialized hauling can also affect the downtime of trucks, if it hasn’t been conducted properly.

Operating Ratio

Increasing equipment costs, driver constraints, labor, and government regulations are a few factors that keep the operating ratio (OR) quite high. In a recent survey, it was found that 71% of respondents reported an OR of 94% or more. The best industry performers have operating ratios less than 90%. There is a strong correlation between OR and utilization, and as such it becomes clear why the issue of OR is among the top in fleet priorities.

Asset Utilization

The respondents of the survey discussed above described the toughest challenge in the next couple of years to be maximizing the asset utilization. The mean utilization – the revenue miles per week of a seated truck – was found to be 2230. Companies having this figure less than 2000 were found to have an OR of more than 97%. Specialized hauling can come in play in asset utilization also.

The increasing regulations, rising equipment prices, and constraints in driver operations, have all led to a tough time for trucking companies to stay afloat and profitable. Having management based on metrics is essential for keeping any trucking company competitive. Some of the progressive trucking companies have started investing in and deploying new technologies to improve their asset utilization, such as specialized hauling, and have been reporting positive outcomes since then. As such, the other trucking companies have to realize their potential and work on the factors discussed above to change the status of their business from barely afloat to a profitable company.

In order to stay profitable, trucking companies need to approach their business through metrics-based systems and stay up-to-date with the new technologies and trends in the industry.

Oversize Load Trucking Companies

The drive to get benefits of outsourcing has far exceeded the systems and processes required to effectively maintain the global supply chain. Many importers, such as oversize load trucking companies, lack a formal solution to efficiently manage international transportation. They are adept at domestic transportation, but lack the skills for airfreight and containerized transportation services. Technology is the key in making it possible to curtail the escalating transportation costs for international freights.

To ensure that transportation is carried out successfully and at lower operational costs, there are three main steps that you can follow:

• Maintain the searches centrally and offer searches for total rates.

• Optimize the selection of carriers before booking them.

• Correctly pay the bills of lading.

Centrally managed data

Centrally managing important data pertaining to total rate search and contracts can help in reducing the overall operational costs. You can access the various freighting rates of oversize load trucking companies and other carriers by using a powerful search engine. This means that the users of the service don’t have to know anything about airfreight or ocean freight pricing. They can simply enter details such as origin, destination, and date, compare the services available with each other, and choose a carrier that can offer the best service and price.

By monitoring the carrier’s tariff rules you can chart out a route that is flexible as well as optimized for the transportation service you are seeking. You can check out the approved carriers and their operational costs on powerful search engines and decide the best option from the available choices.

Optimized carrier selection

The key to cutting down on transportation costs is to automate the carrier selection process and quickly identify all the options available to you, to make better cost and service tradeoffs before initiating the booking process. Shippers efficiently manage contracts and optimize selection of carriers, such as oversize load trucking companies, by automating the contracts with Transportation Management. You can search for a wide range of rates and routing options in a powerful search engine as described above, and choose the best option based on your needs.

Paying the bills of lading on time

With complex rules and specially negotiated contracts, you can expect much higher number of cases of carrier rating errors in oversize load trucking companies and other carriers. You can use the search engines described above to search the actual date of shipping to initiate the lading’s service parameters bills auditing process. This takes only a few minutes at most, and is simple enough to be done by employees under you.

Once you have rated the bill and calculated a bottom line, you can easily determine if the variance has gone “out of tolerance” and needs more study. You can dive into the charge details with a simple click and determine where the discrepancy has occurred. You can even share this with the carrier so that they can correct it as required. Reducing the overall international freight costs can leave you with margin for profit, which you can then invest elsewhere to grow your business.

As the prices for international freighting continues to escalate, it has become important to optimize the routing and pricing so as to cut down on the high costs of operation.

Shipping Strategies for Cost Effectiveness