When you’re managing a business that operates primarily with Less-Than-Truckload shipments (LTL), you’ve already got a lot on your plate to manage multiple shipments.
From finding them, handling documentation, providing quotes, booking the shipment, to the invoicing – it’s a lot to keep on top of for effective shipping.
Plus, there’s the obvious: dispatching.
Dispatching is an entire job role itself.
Managing all the loads your business handles often means you need an entire position dedicated to scheduling all of the loads you’ve taken on. When you’re overseeing a hundred loads or more a month, keeping them all straight isn’t easy.
That’s where the ability to automatically dispatch your LTL loads becomes so valuable – something that BrokerWare™ offers along with the other technology capabilities that help manage your brokerage.
You can increase your capacity to manage LTL loads without having to hire more dispatchers. Instead, they’re able to dispatch trucks without having to call or email multiple points of contact to coordinate the loads.
This leaves your human dispatcher to work on thornier problems, such as customer support or complex shipping routes.
If you’re a smaller business, you may not have a dedicated dispatcher on your payroll. Utilizing automatic dispatching can help you increase your capacity enough to grow your business to afford one – and take on more shipments each month.
Break down the silos in your business that are the barriers to communication.
The biggest problems in running a freight brokerage are often the communication issues between the load finders, dispatchers, and truck drivers as they manage the shipments you book.
Utilizing a comprehensive Transportation Management System (TMS) like BrokerWare™ improves communication throughout your business. Your team doesn’t have to log in to multiple tools to dispatch, invoice, get quotes, or find loads. Instead, it’s all in one place – making it easier for the entire team to work together effectively.
You can still segment how your sales team sees customer data (you can assign specific access through the salesperson portals that BrokerWare™ allows), but the rest of your team needs the ability to see the big picture to effectively manage your shipments.
One system, all of the information you need in one place. Transportation management made easy.
Just what is the automated dispatching capability able to do for you?
As an integral part of the operations of your brokerage, the dispatching ability of BrokerWare™ includes booking, tracking, quote generation, notation, and document storage.
From the portal into the software, it starts with generating a quote – something you can permit your customers to do on their own as well [link to customer portal blog]. For shipments outside of your usual shipping lanes, you can also enable and utilize the RateShare capability. Learn more about RateShare by reading through our past blog discussing it in depth [link to RateShare blog], as it can be an easy way to add a new revenue stream to your business!
Once an acceptable quote is generated, the customer or your team can move directly into booking that shipment. If the customer isn’t ready to book right that second, you can also save the quote for later.
Thanks to our integration with MacroPoint, you can automatically track and manage the loads from within the BrokerWare portal. No need to log in to multiple tools – just a simple click of the mouse and you can see the information you need for each shipment.
Additionally, the ability to add notes or documents to specific shipments is a valuable time saving tool. Bills of lading, invoices, labels – all of that can be located within the shipment details. You or your team don’t need to hunt for the information a customer needs on their shipment.
Plus, it’s all synced up with QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Online, so your accounting team is fully up to date on the status of each account.
Customized reporting options come standard, too.
Anything recorded within BrokerWare™ is data that you can generate a report on. Number of shipments, carrier data, revenue, you name it, you can generate a report.
Your salespeople can even see reports on what their expected commissions are each month, providing incentive for their efforts.
From dispatching to operations management, there’s not much that isn’t made easier when you use BrokerWare™.