Transportation Managers: Carrier Qualification Is Wasting Your Time

How much time are you spending qualifying carriers?

Managing your own transportation department? How much time are you spending on carrier qualification?

We’re betting the answer is too much. It’s understandable when you consider how many pieces of the puzzle you need to track and measure: Training and licensing requirements for new drivers. Strict and costly insurance obligations. Making sure drivers comply with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s CSA ratings. Adhering to additional health and safety standards regulations through OSHA, the DOT, the EPA . . .

The process of qualifying carriers is draining your time and resources.

Try this: Add up all the time you’ve spent in the last few months ensuring operation authority status, tracking SMS scores, sorting through insurance needs, and focusing on all the other little tasks ensuring safe and qualified carriers.

A 3PL will do that for you.

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone could make all those tiny time-consuming tasks disappear? Well, carrier qualification is one key competency of a 3PL.

Logistics providers have considerable experience locating safe and committed drivers. They also have deep knowledge of strict safety and regulatory requirements. And, above all, they have large, established networks of carriers at the ready.

Leveraging these existing carrier relationships is a win-win for all involved. The 3PL is able to offer the carriers in its network a sizable amount of business, which translates to better shipping rates for you.

Why would you wait?

Let’s finish our imaginary exercise. Imagine that you outsourced to a 3PL months ago. Think about what you could have done during that time that would have been more productive and a better use of your leadership skills within your organization.

A 3PL can ease the burden of managing a transportation department in many ways, and carrier qualification is an important one. Why would you wait?

In addition to gifting you all that time back, they can even get you better shipping rates. It seems like kind of a no-brainer — which might explain why so many companies have successfully opted to outsource their transportation needs to a logistics provider.