Carriers

Most operations use 3rd party carriers – parcels carriers, pallet networks or hired in haulage. Different carriers have different rates. Your carriers will probably have overlapping service offerings and may cover the same areas at different costs. Which jobs should you do on your own fleet, which should you give to the carriers and which carriers should you use?

With Optrak you can build in the different carrier rates which can be updated by you when receiving pricing updates. So for any order you can determine the cheapest carrier and its cost.

The optimiser can take carrier rates into account – prioritising orders onto your trips where you can do them more cost-effectively, or leaving them if the carrier rate is good. You can then manually or automatically assign the orders to your chosen carriers. Note, costs show on the orders in Optrak are the individual order cost, so when auto assigning, Optrak will also look into the possibility of grouping orders for the same site thus ensuring the cheapest possible costing carrier. This is seen in the example above as the STRANEIRE site has 2 orders not taking a whole pallet so could be combined and so cost less than the sum of the PARCEL cost.

Finally before you upload results back to your order processing system or WMS so that they can be picked early and put aside for carrier collection, you can quickly check the overall cost of all your carried orders as well as which carriers were chosen, by cross checking the Carriers table.

Rate Sheets

Optrak can deal with different types of carrier pricing based on factors such as:

• Postcode or area
• Weight or volume
• Number of parcels or pallets
• Weight of heaviest item (e.g. 30kg max.)