What’s the best investment of a trucker’s time?
If the measure of success is profit – then the best investment of a trucker’s time has to be driving. There’s the power of the ELD data – to know and understand what a trucker is doing with their time to make more profit.
When a trucker can look at their actual hours on the road, then they can make good decisions about the loads they take.
If a load is offered on a board or through a broker, a trucker may have a feel for whether the offer is going to make money. This is a skill that may only be learned over time. Intuition is the result of experience – it’s the getting the experience part that can be so painful. A far better (and less painful) way is to have solid data analysis to help judge the opportunity. Where do you get the data? From your ELD records.
Deciding on Loads?
Is a load that’s going to take 2 days but only pay $500 worth it? I’ll bet that most truckers don’t have to think a lot about that. What dollar amount does a 2-day haul need?
That number is going to vary significantly from trucker to trucker, from truck to truck. A load going from Columbus, Ohio, to St. Louis, Missouri, is less than 500 miles. The same distance going through mountains instead of the flat Midwest is going to take more time and more fuel.
If a trucker has the data about their time on the road, then it’s much simpler to make decisions about loads. Knowing that driving up through eastern Virginia around Washington DC is going to be slow and eat up hours of service may help make a decision easier. With the right data, truckers will be able to discover the key information they need to decide which loads to take… and when to take a load that isn’t as profitable.
It’s not about luck. It’s about knowledge and how to use it.
That ELD driving data, combined with the different mileage reports, produces the information a trucker needs.
The power of a strong trucking management software is in the solutions it provides to the questions. – TruckingOffice
TruckingOffice TMS and TruckingOffice ELD Data
Do you have the information you need to make smart load decisions? The best routing decisions? With TruckingOffice’s TMS business reports you will have all of that important data at your fingertips. We offer a wide array of reports that you can customize to get the knowledge you need.
The ELD mandate doesn’t feel like it’s a fair deal to truckers who take responsibility for driving safely. It can actually lead to some more dangerous situations when truckers feel they have to speed to deliver a load before their HOS run out. Or a trucker has to drive when it would be smarter to take a nap. We hope the regulations will be changed to recognize these things.
Having a reliable ELD service is critical – just to avoid the potential legal problems. We heard about at least one ELD company that’s already shut down – without warning its customers. There were a lot companies that jumped on the ELD bandwagon when the mandate was announced. They didn’t think about the truckers and the long-term commitment that the ELD mandate required.
On top of a service going down, it’s important to know that your ELD service is keeping your records longer than the past week. Some services only offer to keep the last six months for trucking fleets. TruckingOffice ELD data is kept for you to use long term.
That’s why the TruckingOffice ELD is better than those pop-up ELD businesses that probably never talked to a trucker before launching their products. We’ve got a trucker on our staff to be sure we provided the service that was needed with the trucker in the cab in mind. All those crazy installations? Wires running through the cab? Who wants those? Truckers don’t. They want a simple, reliable service. TruckingOffice ELD provides it.
Want to know more? Learn about the TruckingOffice ELD and get your free ELD Buyers Guide to help you make the right decision for you!
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