LTL Freight News

Approach filing cargo claims as if you are filing a claim with your automobile insurance company. Do not do it unless it is necessary. Impulsively submitting claims against carriers every time something goes or perhaps just looks to have gone wrong, taking that approach won’t lower freight rates nor your car insurance premiums. When both parties stay committed to the partnership, over time, a mutual trust established creates a superior work dynamic. Partners work together to find, to solve and to prevent problems. Whenever things are going good and whenever things are not going good, partners continue working together. When something goes wrong, both shipper and carrier work together making the best of a bad situation and moving forward. Rather than placing blame when something goes wrong, partners look ahead searching for solutions. Whether carrier pricing adjustments or car insurance premium increases, once you file a claim against the company, you will continue to pay for it years i...

There’s no doubt the ruse of free freight can be very attractive to buyers. Many companies insist on free freight being included in their purchasing agreements and negotiations and will also make large purchases from vendors to qualify for it. There is no such thing as free shipping. Freight is never free. Someone has to pay for it.  When sourcing products, having free freight included in the purchasing agreement may feel like a win, but you are paying for the freight cost somewhere else in the cost of the product. Free freight is often used as a psychological selling tool, with the actual freight cost simply factored into the price of the goods you ordered. Some vendors will use this to their advantage and solicit business with the lure of free freight on qualifying bulk orders knowing that companies will place larger than normal orders simply to qualify for it. The problem with placing orders big enough to qualify for free freight is that, in some cases, it requires a company to ...

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) has been the industry standard for years. EDI is a form of communication between two systems where the specific status or value of something is conveyed to another system at a particular time, and ongoing communication between the two systems endures based on scheduled batch exchanges or data transmissions that take place at regularly scheduled time intervals. For example, a shipper may send a carrier a list (or batch) of shipments they would like the carrier to pick up every morning. In turn, the carrier will transmit an EDI file back to the shipper at the end of the day that acknowledges receipt of the request sent by the shipper asking for pickup of those shipments, so the shipper knows the carrier received their request. Shippers and carriers can communicate using this process daily, but the exchange of information is essentially only an exchange of status messages that acknowledges communication being sent and/or received. It doesn’t give any f...

A freight claim is not intended to be a profit center for a claimant, but rather to make the shipper “whole”, as if the carrier had performed their obligation according to the terms of the BOL contract and delivered the shipment as expected, with full market value intact. There are cases where the loss of profit as a result of the damage can be justified within a claim filing; however, in most cases, including profit in the claim is unacceptable. It is presumed that in the event of damage, the shipper would send a replacement for the damaged item out to the consignee and that the shipper’s profit would be secured with the replacement shipment. With the intended profit secured by the replacement and profit also included in the claim, a double profit would occur, causing the carrier to be unreasonably burdened. A freight (damage) claim is a demand from a carrier by a shipper or claimant for monetary reimbursement of a lost or damaged shipment, and the outcome of a claim settlement should...