With our latest release, DAT Truckload Rate Index offers more powerful tools to help you understand and analyze your own rates as well as the rates out in the market. Customizable reports enable brokers and carriers to benchmark the rates they have paid or received against prevailing rates in the markets they serve.
Freight brokers and for-hire carriers use the new features to craft more timely and accurate bids on shippers’ requests for pricing (RFP) and to adapt spot market pricing strategies that take advantage of supply and demand pressures on lanes including seasonal rate changes.
New lane rate tools in Truckload Rate Index include:
• Rate Drill Down: On a single lane search, drill down to see each load you have moved on that lane within the time frame of your search. Use the rate estimate control to select a larger area or longer time frame, so you can view and compare more individual rates. Download a spreadsheet of rates to see all the fields you contributed, including customer, carrier, amount the customer paid, commodity, delivery appointment, and more. Select up to a year of data for an in-depth analysis on a single lane.
A slider (above, right and below) in DAT Truckload Rate Index enables you to control the time frame and geographic area of your rate search.
• Rate Performance Reports: Choose the criteria and drill down, to understand how your pricing strategies fit into the overall market. For example, you can look only at lanes where your average rate diverges from the DAT broker spot rate. Or you can view only the lanes where you have the largest share of rate contributions. Another view can show you lanes where DAT had the highest volume of broker spot rate contributions. These reports also summarize overall how close you are to the DAT broker spot rate.
• Bulk Rate Controls: Choose the geographic area and time frame on a report including hundreds or thousands of lanes. If you want market data on the same lanes each month, you can compare the same area and time frame. It is also valuable to be able to specify the time frame of up to one year, to get the average rate, perhaps while you capture a more specific geographic area. Alternatively, you can set the geographic area to Expanded Market (X-Mkt) and use a shorter time frame, to get the most recent rates for a bigger area.
DAT Truckload Rate Index is based on two unique sets of truckload freight rate data. The shipper contract rates database is comprised of rates from more than 12 million actual freight bills per year between shippers and for-hire carriers. The DAT broker spot market rate database includes 500,000 rates per month from rate agreements between the carriers and freight brokers or other intermediaries.
Let me know what you think of the new features in this release,and what additional features you would like to see in DAT Truckload Rate Index. Your feedback has shaped this product from the beginning and will continue to shape it to make it even more useful for you.
