Technology consulting for LTL carriers

The LTL problems that live in the system

An LTL carrier handles thousands of small shipments that all have to be priced correctly, loaded on the right trailer and delivered to the right door. The margin is in the details: weight, class, cube, accessorials and handling. When the systems that capture those details don't talk to each other, the network quietly pays for it.

• Freight bill accuracy. Bills of lading arrive with wrong weights, classes or piece counts. Reweigh and reclass corrections are found on the dock but don't flow back to the freight bill before it's invoiced, so the correction never gets billed.
• Cubing and dimensions. Dimensioner readings sit in a separate system or a spreadsheet. Without reliable dims, density-based pricing is guesswork and trailer cube utilization is unknown.
• Linehaul planning. Schedules are built on habit instead of load factor. Trailers move half full between terminals, head-haul and back-haul lanes are out of balance, and extra terminal transfers add handling to every shipment that rides them.
• Pickup and delivery. Pickup requests come in by phone and email and get keyed by hand. City drivers run from paper manifests, stop sequencing lives in a dispatcher's head, and delivery appointments are tracked outside the TMS.
• Dock and terminal operations. Freight gets loaded to the wrong trailer, shortages and overages aren't recorded at the door, and nobody can see which shipments are still on the dock at the end of a shift.
• OS&D and claims. Exceptions aren't captured where they happen, so claims arrive weeks later with no record. Root cause by terminal, shift or customer is unknown.
• Tariffs and accessorials. Customer-specific discounts off a base tariff, minimum charges, FSC, liftgate, residential, inside delivery, appointment and limited-access charges are set up inconsistently and missed at billing.
• Partner and interline freight. Shipments handed to partner carriers beyond your service area need EDI 214 status and 210 billing exchanged cleanly, and the revenue split has to reconcile.

How Strong Tower practices apply to LTL

Dock-to-bill process design

With Business Process Optimization, we trace a shipment from pickup request to paid invoice and find every place a weight, class, piece count or exception is captured, changed or lost. Then we redesign the flow so dock corrections update the freight bill before it bills, and exceptions are recorded at the door instead of reconstructed later.

Requirements for dock and P&D technology

Handheld scanning, dimensioners, mobile manifests and electronic POD only pay off if they're tied into the TMS. Business Analysis documents what each terminal actually needs, what your current system can already do, and where the real gaps are, before you spend money on hardware.

Network and profitability analytics

SQL Data Mining & Analytics turns years of freight bill history into decisions: revenue and handling by terminal, linehaul load factor by lane, accessorial leakage, reweigh and reclass recovery, OS&D rates by terminal and shift, and customer profitability after discounts.

Freight bills, manifests and delivery receipts

LTL runs on documents. Reporting & Business Documents covers freight bills, delivery receipts, linehaul and P&D manifests, claims reports and aging, built in the reporting tools your system supports.

Partners, customers and the back office

ELD, EDI & Back-Office Integration handles EDI 204, 214 and 210 with shippers and partner carriers, imaging, and accounting interfaces. Training & Enablement gets dock leads, CSRs and billing clerks working the same process the same way.

What an engagement looks like

Every Strong Tower engagement follows the same arc: Analyze, Streamline, Deliver, Sustain (see How We Work). What changes by segment is where we look first and which numbers we put in front of you. For an LTL carrier, a typical engagement runs like this:

1. Terminal walk-through. We walk the dock, ride along on the process from pickup to delivery, and sit with CSRs, dispatch, linehaul planning, billing and claims. Then we review tariffs, accessorial setups, interfaces and data quality in the TMS.
2. Findings. A written assessment ranks issues by dollars and risk: unbilled corrections, missed accessorials, linehaul load factor, OS&D patterns and manual steps.
3. Plan. Scope, owners, schedule and a test plan, starting with the billing fixes that recover revenue fastest.
4. Execute. Process changes, configuration, reports, integrations and training, managed to plan, terminal by terminal if needed.
5. Sustain. KPIs such as reweigh recovery, accessorial capture, load factor and claims ratio, tracked on a set cadence.

Most carriers start with a fixed-scope Technology Assessment.

Signs it's time to bring in help

It's usually time to call when revenue is slipping through the dock or the network is growing faster than the systems behind it. Common triggers:

• Reweigh and reclass corrections are found on the dock but rarely make it onto the freight bill.
• Accessorials like liftgate, residential and inside delivery are performed far more often than they're billed.
• Linehaul schedules haven't been revisited since the network changed.
• Claims arrive with no exception record from the dock.
• A new terminal, a partner carrier or a dimensioner project is coming and nobody has mapped how it ties into the TMS.

Each of these has a measurable cost, and most can be addressed with process and configuration changes in the system you already own.

Frequently asked questions