If you are in the logistics business, you would know that getting the best out of your drivers and freight vehicles can sometimes be difficult. This happens to both small- and large-scale logistic companies. The constant increment in price competition creates the all-important need for you to maximize your drivers and freight vehicles. Proper load planning, when correctly done, helps you through the murky waters of transportation management. This article will brief you on how to load planning can benefit your company.
What is Load Planning?
Load planning is the method of merging cargo to get the best of the capacity of your drivers and trucks. Several shipments can be transported in the smallest number of trucks when load planning is in place.
Load planning’s goal is to limit the number of trucks or vehicles generally plying the roads (and, in the same vein, transportation expenditures) while increasing productivity. It’s not as easy as cramming as many palettes as possible into a container. You have to consider the vehicle’s specs (for example, refrigeration), destination, a center of gravity, product kind, and many more.
Major Responsibilities of a Load Planner
The role of a load planner in your business is to improve the effectiveness of your company’s operation as a whole. Suppose you intend to be more effective in outbound logistics. In that case, you need to be able to maximize the capability of your fleet. Not only that, but you also become more efficient at bottom-line business growth and reduce overhead when you utilize load planning. Listed below are some of the duties of a load planner.
- Making The Best Use of Capacity
A load planner’s principal responsibility is to consolidate goods to ensure that the payload capacity is optimally maximized: load planners must be able to mix and match loads based on vehicle capacity, cargo type, size, and destination.
For instance, they must mix bigger deliverables with smaller ones to utilize optimum space. They must also consider the endpoint of each item (even when it gets unpacked) and the balance and weight, among other things. Load planners must decide whether palletized goods are the best option or whether they should use an alternative loading method.
- Adherence to Regulations
Compliance with new regulations is a constant challenge for many logistics business owners and their drivers. A load planner knows how to balance all necessary cargoes between them if just a few vehicles are certified or refrigerated to convey NRHM (non-radioactive hazardous material).
- Decreasing Unnecessary Expenses
As stated earlier, it’s not just about cramming as much cargo as possible into one truck. A load planner should consider things like loading sequence, driver overtime, destinations, and so on.
With poor load planning, there are always more drivers and trucks on the road than are required. Unexpected delays can force shipments to be repetitive, which results in labor overtime, additional mileage, labor, lateness, and others.
Conclusion
As a freight business owner, this article has hopefully opened you up to some of the reasons your business needs load planning. You should, of course, prioritize this if you haven’t already because there are a lot of benefits that your business stands to gain. These benefits are not exclusive to the afore-listed.
