Within the transportation marketplace, brokers provide a myriad of services. Brokers fill the gaps between shippers, owner-operators, and draymen. Brokers also assist shippers and trucking companies with resource and technology-constraints. In addition, brokers help cover capacity shortfalls and often provide ancillary services like transportation management outsourcing.
Like everyone else, brokers want to make money. They earn their income by making connections and knowing the market. Brokers live and die by information. They use arbitrage and leverage between available truckload capacity and shipper demand. When there are plenty of trucks competing, brokers keep their fees to a minimum and work to pair available capacity with shipper needs. When capacity is scarce, rates go up; it’s more difficult to secure capacity and to increase margins over time. Sometimes scarcity results in significant markups over the actual cost of the truck. It doesn’t take long for brokers to cover enough shipments to make a profit that offsets any losses. Interestingly, capacity tightening is often regular, seasonal, even predictable — barring catastrophic events like major storms and geopolitical disruptions. Yet, shippers always seem willing to pay the premium when capacity tightens. Thanks to regularly occurring demand surges, brokers can usually be assured opportunities to turn a profit.
In every shipper’s roster of available carriers and capacity, brokers have their place. This is especially true when shippers don’t have the time or means to find asset-based carriers. They also frequently help with unusual, one-off service requests. To ensure the alignment of costs and value, shippers must think strategically about the utilization of brokers. At a minimum, a shipper should have a relationship with at least one broker, contracts in place, and established rates. Shippers also need to clarify liability, payment terms, accessorials, and required minimum service standards. These terms are required in advance to protect shippers from unforeseen circumstances potentially impacting shipments.
Shippers’ agents act as extensions of your staff. Like your employees, these agents are measured by a combination of service, cost, and quality of work. However, the shippers’ agent model minimizes your fixed costs and helps you avoid making difficult staffing decisions in tough economic times. Inherent to the model is transparency regarding levels of service. Clients also have the flexibility to change service levels without making changes to technological infrastructure.
IntelliTrans is a Shippers’ Agent
IntelliTrans augments the shipper-broker-carrier relationship and provides complete transparency of rates, pricing, capacity, and the entire supply chain. We provide accurate, easy-to-access metrics, and give our customers a clear picture of their freight in the marketplace. Our pricing is on a per-shipment basis, making it purely transactional. In other words, when business is good you pay more, and when business is bad you pay less. Our team of career professionals leverage our technology and honed business processes to drive successful outcomes. We manage your freight regardless of the season or state of capacity in the market.
At IntelliTrans we work on your behalf to keep costs low – consistently. Our team contains cost by effectively managing your commitments with carriers and by avoiding higher fees during periods of high demand and low supply. IntelliTrans partners with customers for the long-term. We earn our fees based on the quality of services that we provide and our ability to innovate. You can depend on us to meet your freight needs with creative, technology-backed solutions.