The trucking and logistics industry is always changing and rate data can end up being your most valuable tool in securing more business or it can be your worst enemy.
We count down our top 5 reasons to use a good third party freight rate index...
- Checking your recent internal freight lane rate history just isn't enough.
Why a freight rate index and not just your own internal lane history? Your own internal rate or lane history is probably lying to you OR it's just too small of a picture to give you a good read on what the larger market is doing. These web based Rate Index and Rate Checking applications are able to aggregate thousands of rates in the same amount of time your company moves a few loads through your TMS. - Your recent freight bills are even more biased to your own negotiations.
Reviewing your own freight bills whether they are from you billing your customers or bills that you received from carriers are only a tiny part of the picture and are usually tainted by your own negotiating style or your vendor/carrier's negotiation styles. - Filtering accurate data in the right time period is just not that easy.
Getting thousands of rates that are pulled from the most accurate possible places in the freight market is not an easy task and crunching all those numbers...well frankly is what computers and software applications were designed to do best. - Get an accurate picture of what's going on in major lanes easily at anytime.
Web Apps like ComFreight allow you to access and quickly pull average line haul rates from thousands of bids or rate transactions instantly from anywhere and at anytime. No more filtering through hundreds of lines of loads in your TMS or having to go back to your office to give an accurate quote. You can login, check and give an accurate rate with confidence (especially if you're a carrier or broker) anywhere. - In the grand scheme an extra check on the freight market costs you nothing!
Being able to accurately cross check your own lane rate history against 3rd party data that's aggregating and tracking a much larger stream of data is worth its weight in GOLD. Most rate indexes cost around 20-30$ per month. That extra check could be adding an extra 100-300$ to each load you move or saving you even more when booking or deciding if pricing provided to you is accurate. In fact at ComFreight we provide our Rate Index Free of charge to anyone who is a paying subscriber. A little more visibility means an exponential increase in your decision making power.
ComFreight provides it's freight rate index free of charge as an added additional feature for all paying carrier or broker subscribers. Shipper users can also access this tool by upgrading their account to a full access account from the Settings menu while logged into their account. Access the Rate Index from the ComBoard (your home login screen).
Post is written by Steve Kochan, Founder and CEO of ComFreight.com.
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