FindItMore | Efficiency and production are crucial elements for successful delivery and freight services. Effectively managing a supply chain can be a difficult task when there is cargo, transportation services, and a variety of destinations that must be handled as well. Load planning offers trucking companies and logistics services a technical evolution that makes these processes more efficient. When doing load planning correctly, it can ultimately help with profit margins, enhance delivery capacity, and help companies compete on price.
Learn more about what load planning in logistics is, how it can help your business, and it is best implemented.
What is load planning?
Load planning, also known as load optimization, refers to the shipping process that uses trucks, railcars, pallets, and any container in an effective way with the aim to reduce transportation costs by minimizing the number of vehicles on the road for maximum efficiency. Optimizing loading planning will also prevent cargo damage, improve client satisfaction and will save on unloading and loading times. Further, utilizing this modern technology will curate a loading plan for a route and will subsequently evaluate and streamline the picking, packing, and shipping process to ensure proficiency in all matters.
Loading planning responsibilities
There are various responsibilities a business’s loading planner undertakes, including curating optimal efficiency of an entire operation, minimizing overhead, and enabling and overseeing growth within a business. But despite all these responsibilities, there are also essential roles that take precedence over the loading planning duties. Some of the duties include:
- Reducing costs when needed: Optimal load planning should reduce costs by taking certain factors into account like driver overtime, smooth loading sequence, the destinations, and how to decrease the chances of delays by only having as many trucks on the road as required.
- Optimal capacity: Proper load planning should assist with maximizing the capacity of the trucks and those who drive them by placing matching loads based on their size, the cargo type, the space within the vehicle, and destination. This should ensure that the cargo reaches its destination promptly and safely.
- Meeting regulations: Load planning can help trucking companies ensure that drivers comply with the proper regulations when transporting cargo. A methodical load planner will factor in vehicle characteristics instead of just capacity for assured compliance.
Features to include within the load planning system
For best use, a planning loading system should include features and optimal software that will enhance its functionality. Some of the best features and software include:
- Sequence picking: Containers are positioned in a certain order and way to reduce the length of the pick path. This is utilized to confirm the proper pick sequence that will greatly deduct from selection time.
- Stackability: This can be a feature that will enable control over product assignment to certain containers in order to reduce the chance of damaging other items in containers when they are stacked beside each other.
- Container capacities: Every piece of cargo has its own container and place. Because pieces of cargo have individual characteristics, some load planning software allows logistics managers to assign these products to varying containers based on their specific attributes.
- Side-to-side balancing: This particular loan planning feature allows logistic staff members to make sure the trailer will become unbalanced from a side-to-side basis.
- Axel weight: Similar to the side-to-side balance feature, the axel weight feature will automatically adjust the loading plans to concisely balance the weight that is distributed to each of the axels positioned on the tractor-trailer.
- Capacity override: Taking into account the limitations presented by the door within the trailer and the position of cargo, the capacity override function sees to placing cargo in strategic positions considering these constraints.
Conclusion
Because logistics is such a complex industry that leaves little room for error, utilizing technological systems software for system planning and the array of features can increase effectiveness and productivity. Delivery management can now become seamless and cost-efficient for trucking companies when using optimized load planning.
Steele’s Transportation Group is the trucking company in Calgary that you can trust. We have one goal in mind: to get items and products from one location to another in record time. We offer reliable, competitive and professional trucking services in Calgary, Red Deer and Edmonton. Our team are trained to handle all types of products and can travel across the province and even into the USA. To speak to one of the leading trucking companies in Calgary, Red Deer and Edmonton, contact our Head Office at 403-264-0808 or check out our website here: https://www.steelesgroup.com