As everyone knows, it is very difficult to time the stock market. While we are all aware of the old adage, “buy low and sell high”, in reality, this is not easy to do.

When it comes to freight rates, it is sometimes problematic to select the right time to put a company’s freight out for bid. The last few years have been particularly challenging for shippers. After the Great Recession, carriers have been adding capacity in a prudent and deliberate way. Gone are the days when carriers build transport companies and hope that shippers will come. In addition to managing their fleet capacity, carriers have also been challenged with the struggle of recruiting qualified drivers.

Consolidation in the trucking industry has been very prevalent in recent years. In Canada, companies such as TransForce have acquired large chunks of the small parcel, LTL and truckload sectors. There are simply fewer carriers for a shipper to choose from. Carriers have gained pricing leverage over the past few years.

In my last blog, I outlined a set of tips to help carriers achieve greater success with Freight Bids. Here are a few more.

Put your best foot forward early in the process

Freight Bids or Freight RFPs have been around for over two decades. Every year we hear comments about their imminent demise. Unfortunately for many motor carriers, this is wishful thinking. While these exercises are often detested by freight companies, they are popular with shippers across North America. Why? When well done, they provide the shipper with better service providers at a lower cost.

One of the popular themes at many freight conferences is the talk of shipper-carrier partnerships and collaboration. I have heard this theme for a decade. If only shippers would sit down with their carriers, they could pull costs out of their operations and become more efficient.

While this is possible and even probable, the problem with this scenario is that the shipper is left wondering if carrier B could pull even more costs out of the operation than carrier A. This explains why so many shippers have contracted their freight to logistics service providers. They are not convinced that if they forgo the RFP in favor of collaboration, they will derive the maximum benefit. Thus the popularity of freight bids.

Freight bid projects have become one of the most commonly used methods of sourcing freight transportation services over the past two decades. They have become popular with shippers for obvious reasons. When done well, they produce good results. Manufacturers and distributors can strengthen their supply chains by selecting a dedicated group of professional transportation companies and save money on freight costs.

The carrier perspective on freight bids is often quite different from that of most shippers. They tend to dislike them for several reasons.

1. Many bids are not well done.

2. The process of responding to these bids is a lot of work and they often don’t produce any business.

Monitoring carrier performance is an ongoing process. Some trucking companies will track performance for new shippers with a heightened level of intensity for a designated period of time and then revert back to old habits or standard service levels when the shipper’s focus is no longer there.

Every shipper should understand that there is no start or finish date to monitoring carrier performance. During the bid process, shippers need to outline the service performance that they expect and set up processes and reports to receive actual performance data on an ongoing basis. A web-based dashboard can allow shippers to monitor key KPIs (e.g. missed pick-ups, on-time deliveries) in real time. Monthly scorecards can provide the shipper with detailed reports and highlight any service failures that may have occurred. For new carriers, weekly reports and meetings may be necessary to ensure a smooth implementation.

As the carriers come up the learning and performance curves, these meetings can be cut back to monthly, quarterly or semi-annual, as needed. Success from freight bids is a result of a high level of attention to detail. Dashboards and scorecards that provide information on service, billing accuracy, missing or lost freight, are invaluable tools. These tools coupled with ongoing meetings will help keep the carriers’ “feet to the fire” and maintain the levels of savings achieved.