Two important factors of any broker-carrier relationship are trust and familiarity – brokers desire to work with carriers they know to be reliable. Freight matching with trusted carriers allows brokers to spend more time cultivating a robust carrier base and move more freight for their customers.
When brokers moved from DAT Power to DAT One, they gained new tools. For example, the Private Network feature in DAT One and Priority Booking, along with the capacity sourcing mainstay Premium LaneMakers.
Whether the market is loose or tight, laying the groundwork to maintain consistent coverage during the various ebbs and flows of the freight cycle can never start too soon.
Private Network
When posting a shipment to a load board, one question always comes up: Can I depend on the carriers who see this posting?
With Private Network, brokers can establish a subset of preferred carriers to receive shipment posting visibility. Doing so saves time vetting carriers and strengthens existing business partnerships. Whether or not the carrier is a DAT customer, they can be added to a Private Network and even structured into groups such as corridor, customer, equipment type, and others for more strategic freight matching. This also provides the avenue for integrated, automatic freight matching, namely Priority Booking.
What does Priority Booking mean?
- Priority Booking tools let brokers offer loads directly to their Private Network of carriers with automated tendering
- Allows you to make money, not phone calls, and spend time focusing on growing your business
- Priority Booking gives the option for brokers to receive bids from Private Network carriers for tendered loads, streamlining the negotiation process
- Set thresholds for a maximum bid to weed out any offers outside the desired range
- Priority Booking can integrate fully into your TMS to make the booking process more efficient
- Ask your DAT Account Manager how you can incorporate API integration into your freight matching workflow
Here is a example from our shipment posting UI of how Priority Booking is managed:
What to do when your private network lacks depth
The strongest carrier base will still have gaps, and reliance on transactional bookings is something all brokers experience. When new or difficult lanes arise with little carrier coverage history to draw from, knowing which carriers operate in those corridors is powerful. Another valuable tool within DAT One to help strengthen capacity networks is the premium version of Lane Makers.
The premium version of Lane Makers:
- Allows brokers to find the hidden capacity for their most problematic lanes
- Shows which carriers are searching the lanes you are trying to cover not just the truck posting activity that is visible on truck search or regular Lane Makers
- Provides you the ability to strategically partner with carriers to form new mutually beneficial relationships
- Updates daily to give you visibility to new carrier activity with results filterable from the prior 30 days up to the past year
Finding carriers to expand your capacity network and stabilize coverage on new or difficult lanes is a key component of a healthy capacity strategy. By engaging in new relationships with mutually desired outcomes, you can grow your Private Network of reliable, vetted carriers, and move more consistent lanes with less touches through Priority Booking. This in turn frees up valuable time and resources to pursue more opportunities with your customers and continue the growth of your brokerage.
Please reach out to your customer success team member if you have any questions or if you would like more information about how DAT can help your brokerage use any of our tools.
About the author:
Josh Hanselman is a Customer Solutions Architect as a part of our Enterprise Customer Success team. Josh joined DAT with 17 years experience in the supply chain industry, wearing many different hats from brokerage capacity management, strategic enterprise account management and pricing strategy, to logistics warehousing and distribution sales.
