Axele TMS and DAT recently partnered for a webinar to show how carriers can use our combined tools to find the best loads fast. If you missed it, you can watch the recording here and access the slides here.
Below is an overview of the webinar, with strategies and tactics you can put to use in your carrier business.
Biggest keys to success
One recurring theme from the webinar was exploring ways to use Axele and DAT to leverage both sides of the DAT Load Board network.
- Advertise Yourself – Post your trucks and let brokers call you.
- Search Available Loads – There are three ways to search:
- Smart Search
- Active Search
- LaneMakers
- Set Alarms – Use alarms to notify you when new loads are posted that match your needs. Alarms will notify you in any of the DAT Load Board products.
- Subscribe to Trendlines – Get weekly updates on the national average rates plus supply and demand information for each major trailer types (van, reefer and flatbed)
- Monitor Market Conditions – Market Conditions map provides a real-time heat index to see where your trucks are in highest demand and where you can get the best rates.
- Plan Your Trip – With routing tools such as TriHaul, you can get automatic suggestions for triangular routes based on the loads you’re searching. These routes can help boost your rate per mile and avoid lower-paying lanes.
- Find new business partners – The DAT Directory within the load board allows you to research who you’re considering doing business with first, with, address, phone number, DOT number, company reviews and more..
- Negotiate Rates – With these DAT tools at your fingertips, you have all the information to negotiate the best, most profitable rates for success.
You got the load — what’s next?
This is where the DAT / Axele partnership really adds benefits, letting you run your business like a well-oiled machine.
Axele TMS helps you manage loads, dispatch trucks, manage settlements and more. Once you get the load and enter the details into your Excel sheet, Google doc or send a rate confirmation text, Axele gives you the ability to drag and drop your rate confirmation and auto-populate the load data. You can then assign a driver or you can see the dispatch system in a Gantt chart. Axele also offers both an internal and external share links to load tracking, reducing the check calls and giving visibility into more accurate load arrival ETAs.
Axele also gives you greater insight into the revenue for each load, pulling in all the load information with Axele’s integration into DAT and applying all costs to show the profit per load.
This process can be time consuming, but Axele has automated it. You can invoice right away in near real-time, helping cash flow. Driver settlements are flexible and can be set up to pay a flat fee, per mile, percentage of topline revenue, etc. It calculates everything for you, making it easy to know how much to pay. Axele also provides robust reports, tracking in and out times, loaded miles, empty miles and detention times in an executive dashboard view to watch your weekly performance closely. They make it easy to upload documents and provide an easy to search document repository to find documents you need to access quickly.
Axele integrates with all DAT load board products. Learn more here or contact DAT with any questions. https://www.dat.com/forms/sales-inquiry/customersupport/
