Does a live dispatch board really help carriers?
For years, transportation professionals and truck dispatchers at smaller and midsized companies have used phones, tracking spreadsheets, and basic accounting programs to manage freight flow.
There’s nothing wrong with these standard tools in a slower, less-competitive world. But they do have drawbacks: The time sink required for multiple personnel and the potential for spreadsheet or input errors can all drag on your organization’s growth as you scope out new work and seek the best loads and the best carrier partners.
So, what do you look for when you want to view loads, trucks, and transactions in real-time? And how can you help ensure your truck dispatchers get beyond their fear of increased radio traffic and extra demands and move through their digital transformation to better productivity?
How a live dispatch board optimizes transportation dispatching
Live load boards (aka, live dispatch boards) can help your dispatchers achieve their best transportation outcomes. Live load boards combine the dispatching function into one desktop, web-based, or app-based system—a more-centralized, simpler, and more convenient approach that reduces potential errors and leads to better reporting, productivity, and more informed decision making.
Dispatching software is synchronized with pickup and dropoff events as they happen, either by using mobile data terminals or computers in vehicles, with drivers reporting to dispatch via radio or cell phone about each pickup and dropoff as they perform them.
Better transportation through better data and monitoring
Live load dispatch software offers users digitization, visualization, better data and integration, and better monitoring to facilitate operations. Standard live dispatch features streamline communications between drivers and dispatchers:
- Up-to-the-minute data helps users quickly measure and analyze how operations are performing. Integration capabilities also streamline communications and reporting. For example, the DAT Power load board provides data on truckload (TL) rates based on actual transactions, not bids, across 65,000 lanes. DAT Power also has a payment guarantee that covers payments of up to $1,000 per load.
- Analysis of planned vs. actual routes provides flexibility to take advantage of schedule or route changes.
- Up-to-the-minute recording of trip/driver/vehicle status gives multiple users a clear overview at all times.
- Automatically recorded pickup and dropoff time stamps eliminate staff’s need to enter time values from the driver’s manifests/logs.
- A dashboard that shows which routes are running behind or late allows for faster recognition of problems or potential problems and enables preemptive/corrective action.
- Automatic vehicle location (AVL) provides a map of all vehicles’ last reported positions; live tracking is possible using mobile data terminals/mobile data computers.
- Trip tickets displayed on the dispatch board reduce the time and effort customarily dedicated to properly tracking all trip statuses.
- With all the features, management, supervisors, and relief dispatchers can quickly assess field operations and on-time performance as it occurs.
Live dispatch boards offer many more benefits for savvy shippers who want their operations to outstrip those of competitors. Learn more about how LoadOps, the intelligent TMS, offers a live dispatch board to track drivers and assets in real-time.
Learn more about LoadOps.