Using FreightPath For Carrier Compliance And Carrier Vetting

What Is Carrier Compliance And Carrier Vetting?

Carrier vetting is an extremely important part of being a freight broker. It involves the process of researching a potential freight carrier partner to insure their safety record, service timeliness and insurance coverage - known collectively as carrier compliance - to determine whether or not the freight carrier in question is the fit for the job.

There are a variety of best-practice strategies and processes that most freight brokerages and 3PLs enforce to guarantee the safety, security, and timeliness of the freight they handle. You can read about some of these strategies in detail in this article - How To Vet Carriers For Your 3PL Or Freight Brokerage.

In this tips & tricks article, we'll be focus on how to best track the complex moving parts of carrier compliance through three lenses:

1. How can you take notes on past carrier experiences?
2. How do you prevent yourself from booking with known bad apples?
3. How do you ensure up-to-date paperwork from carriers?

How can you take notes on past carrier experiences?

Using FreightPath's freight network management features, you and the rest of freight brokerage team can take detailed notes on past carrier experiences. Why would you want to do this extra work?

James Almquist, account manager at FactorForce and founder of freight tech startup HelloCargo explains it like this - "Keep detailed notes in your TMS about bad interactions with past carriers to shut them off as needed. But also make note of good carriers so you can try to use them as much as possible."

You can accomplish this easily in FreightPath by going to the "Relationship" page of each carrier you work with. Here, you can take notes that are shared across your team, but hidden to carriers, customers and other parties outside of your freight brokerage team.

How do you prevent yourself from booking with known bad apples?

The same relationship tab in FreightPath can also help you achieve the goal of the second question - how do you stop you and your team from booking with freight carriers that you already know are bad or of poor quality?

This seems like a simple question if you only work with a few carriers, but this usually isn't the case. Based on our research and data, the average small freight broker (100-300 loads a month) can work with hundreds, if not thousands of carriers in a single year. This means that relying on remembering the bad apples in your head, or even sticky notes on your desktop can quickly get out of control.

Good news though - using FreightPath's carrier compliance features, you can give individual carriers a do-not-use flag. Not only will this display an obvious red X in front of the carrier's name in FreightPath, it'll actually warn and stop your team from booking with that freight carrier!

How do you ensure up-to-date paperwork from carriers?

Finally, we come to managing compliance paperwork - probably the most painful part of the entire carrier vetting process.

As Anthony Natale, CEO of Freight Genie and former account exec at Mosaic Logistics put it - you've got to make sure your carriers have no expired or uncovered insurance, a clean safety record and no history of claims against them. Furthermore, these documents should be stored in a centralized platform that all employees of a brokerage can access if needed, says Anthony - it's critical that sales and dispatch can easily access carrier compliance records if they need to find alternate carriers, quickly quote a load, or for any other reason.

This can also be done with FreightPath's carrier compliance feature - allowing you to easily upload and store unlimited documents per carrier. That's just the start though - FreightPath's compliance is unique and powerful for two reasons:

1. Carriers can self-manage their documents through their carrier portal - reducing data entry work, miscommunication and creating an incentive for carriers to stay engaged with your freight brokerage.
2. You can set expiry dates and get real-time alerts about expired documents that need to be replaced, renewed or updated.

All you need to get started is to visit the compliance page of each carrier's network profile in your FreightPath TMS.