There are good transport contracts, and bad transport contracts - learn more about the main differences between them!
The Best and Worst Transport Contracts
If you are working in the haulage industry, whether you are an owner operator or a salaried employee, you'll know enough about transport contracts to know that no two jobs are the same. You'll have had jobs where everything went right, and loads that you simply couldn't wait to be rid of.
Sometimes it is hard to foresee which one will turn out to be unpleasant until you've signed on the dotted line - other times, the signs are there from the outset that there is going to be trouble! Of course, there are also the dream jobs where a company treats you right, pays you well, and you have a straightforward, stress free drive to your destination and back.
But while it may not always be possible to know whether a job will be heaven or hell before you take it, there are a few common characteristics of good and bad transport jobs...
A Good Job Means...
You'll be working with a decent company that takes care of its drivers, issues professional transport contracts, pays a decent wage and legally complies with all the necessary industry regulations. If they are providing the vehicle, it will be well maintained. They will give you clear instructions, communicate with you in a coherent fashion, and the loading and unloading process will be nice and smooth. There's nothing worse than wasting time sitting around waiting to load or unload!
On a good job, you'll have a secure load that isn't fragile, and that is evenly weighted so that it doesn't cause problems with your vehicle's handling. An ideal job will give you plenty of opportunities to pick up backloads for your return journey, and might even have one of these built into the contract. Another final little perk is to be given a scenic route to drive through - spending your whole day on the road is made more enjoyable if you've got some decent scenery to look at along the way!
A Bad Job Means...
Above all else, if you've got an unpleasant job it is usually because your employer isn't up to scratch. Their transport contracts will be filled with small print that is seemingly designed to make your life a nightmare. If they provide a vehicle, it'll be poorly maintained and potentially dangerous to drive. They will be difficult to deal with, and there will be endless delays and huge amounts of paperwork every step of the way.
You'll be dispatched to the middle of nowhere with unclear instructions and no chance of picking up a backload on your way back, and the load you've got will be poorly secured and liable to shift around and break along the way. If you are sent abroad on a nightmare job, you'll be sent somewhere with overzealous police and complicated regulations to comply with. The entire job will be time consuming hassle from start to finish, and to cap it all off, they will be late paying you once you do finally finish your work!
Every haulage worker will have to deal with good jobs and bad jobs - but if you learn to recognise the signs of good transport contracts, you'll have a much better chance of picking up the right kind of jobs!
Lyall Cresswell is the Managing Director of Haulage Exchange, the leading online trade network for the road transport industry across the UK and Europe. It provides services and transport contracts to buy and sell road transport and freight exchange in the domestic and international markets.
This may seem an unlikely article for me to write at first. Working in the road transport industry, many people assume it is automatically impossible to have a green conscience. This isn't surprising, given that my job depending on hundreds of haulage vehicles dragging loads up and down the country, producing all those environment damaging carbon emissions along the way. Actually, the truth is that my job allows me to be both a green advocate and a road haulage representative while still helping me claim a salary. No, I haven't invented a device that changes exhaust emissions into pure oxygen - it's simply thanks to the nature of freight exchanges.
It works like this: under normal circumstances, drivers or companies manage their own loads with their customers, make their delivery and then return home to the depot for the next load. Environmentally and on a human level, this isn't efficient. The driver is, in effect, only being paid for the outbound journey, and in these times when the price of fuel seems to be rising on an almost daily basis, this is financially crippling. Now consider a freight exchange - a network of suppliers and drivers/companies who distribute their loads between them meaning that the return journey can contain another job. This means the trip is paid for (both ways) and therefore the haulage company is not operating at a loss (even for a minute) and profits can rise.
All well and good, but this still isn't looking particularly environmentally friendly is it? Wait, I'm getting to that.
Now, if this return load is being distributed back to someone who is already out on the road, it won't be given to a driver for whom that would be the sole purpose of the trip. This means that there are less wasted journeys (every mile involved has a delivery attached) and therefore less unnecessary carbon emissions all over the place. Better still, if this collaboration for efficiency continues across the industry, then less trucks will be required to shift all the work, and we may even see the decommissioning of these carbon-emitting behemoths. The environment will surely jump for joy.
Unlike most environmentally friendly solutions which require an element of self sacrifice, the freight exchange actually creates benefits across the board: the haulage companies/owner operators make more money, the roads get less congested and the environment becomes less polluted. Everybody wins - and for that reason, we have seen impressive pick up for our online freight exchange for the 7.5tonne and above market: Haulage Exchange.
I can't say whether our customer base is growing for monitory or environmental reasons (or both), but whichever it is, the gradual migration to us and other freight exchanges is great news for the environment. And if our drivers save themselves significant money as well, then all the better.
Luke Humble is the Website manager for The Transport Exchange Group. Their website for the 7.5 tonne and over market, Haulage Exchange, is one of the UK's leading independent and fastest growing freight exchanges.The exchanges are neutral, actively managed and with strict quality control to ensure smooth running.
Everyone will agree that GPS vehicle tracking is an interesting application, that can provide a company's management with detailed and up-to-date information on their fleet, but many will ask themselves what actual value it can deliver to the bottom line.
This article takes a look at just three examples of published case studies related to GPS vehicle tracking to illustrate how different types of business that rely of road transport have themselves stated that they gain real business benefit simply through being able to make use of the information arising from GPS vehicle tracking systems in their wider operations.
The first example relates to a typical small business that has around half a dozen engineers who maintain heating systems around the local region.
Even with a relatively small fleet of six vehicles it was clear that improvements in its management could be made. Keeping track of vehicles and allocation of jobs was time consuming relying on regular calls in and out of the office. Emergency call-outs required calls to every engineer to determine the most appropriate response. Scheduling required a significant element of guesswork and the large amounts of paper-based management records were a challenge to maintain.
The adoption of GPS vehicle tracking enabled the business to make immediate savings. Initial savings stemmed from reduced private usage. Now, 18 months on, fuel bills have on average more than halved. In addition, the comprehensive reporting made possible has made compliance with VAT regulations and business planning straightforward. In terms of customer service and efficiency savings, just having reliable information about each engineers location makes emergency call-out management much more effective than previously possible.
A second example relates to a regional distribution business. Again the immediate benefit was found to be a saving in fuel. On fuel savings alone, the return on investment was four-fold - after just three months the measured savings were sufficient to offset the cost of the system for the whole year. Moreover, the effect on management was significant. In this case the company monitored the vans to every stop they made and as a result they could clearly identify where they encroached on each others' areas. Now, the workload is more evenly distributed across drivers, vans and geography in order ensure that the workload is properly distributed and mileage is more evenly distributed across the whole fleet.
A third example is from a mid-sized road haulage company operating a fleet of around 50 vehicles. Here the challenges for the transport management team include compliance with limited drivers' hours, the need to maximise vehicle usage whilst reducing fuel costs and overheads
With fleet tracking now operational, customers are kept up to speed with accurate arrival estimates and the system helps with planning; driving time, wasted fuel and inaccurate overtime payments have all been reduced, making the best use of the entire fleet. Even small reductions in distance travelled can yield a very worthwhile saving when a vehicle does just six to eight miles to the gallon.
So, from these three very diverse examples of real case studies, ranging from a small fleet of vans up to a large fleet of HGV trucks, to common themes emerge.
Firstly, all cases report a significant saving in fuel expenditure - and that financial saving alone far exceeds the subscription costs of the tracking system itself. Secondly, each business in its own way has found it relatively straightforward to improve their overall operational efficiency through applying the additional knowledge that fleet tracking can deliver, to either working more efficiently or delivering enhanced customer service.
Iain Jones works with Zest Tracking who are a leading UK provider of fleet and vehicle tracking solutions.
Our research suggests that there are over 17 million skips hired in the UK every year for domestic use alone! That's a lot of skips and if you've ever looked in Yellow Pages you'll see that there are a lot of skip companies out there to choose from with no real way of knowing what kind of service you're going to get before it turns up!
If, like us, you've ever hired a skip, chances are you will have had a good experience with a professional, licensed waste collector with no hassles or grief.
Unfortunately, this is not always the case. If you called more than one company before you actually hired a skip you may have found that some of them:
- won't quote prices over the phone
- won't tell you what time it will be dropped off, or picked up
- will only accept cash payments to the driver
You might have even had a bad experience where the driver has refused to take away your skip without throwing some of the rubbish back in your garden, demanded more money before taking it away, damaged your property by bad handling of their wagon and the skip...
This guide is for you: It answers all the most common questions associated with skip hire so that you know exactly what you're getting into when you hire a skip and understand the whys and wherefores involved in skip hire so you never have a bad experience...EVER!
1. How can I tell which skip companies in the Yellow Pages are the good ones?
Unless you personally know the company, you can't. Any fool with a wagon and a skip can get an advert designed and printed to entice you to call them, but mainly it's a lottery not just in terms of prices and service, but also in terms of what actually happens to your waste - something that depressingly few of us actually think, or even care about.
Skip companies are not actually regulated at the time of writing. The good ones operate their own licensed waste transfer stations (regulated by the Environment Agency) and are members of the Institute of Wastes Management (a professional body that promotes education and raising standards in waste management).
The bad ones are just cowboys that often fly-tip your waste and therefore add to your council tax bill - cos the council are the ones who have to clean it up! (Flytipping is now costing local councils over £2.5 million a year! That's our tax money!) Did you know? "Every 35 seconds, somebody, somewhere is fly-tipping in the UK"
2. Why do skips cost so much money?
No-one is pretending skip hire is cheap, but think about the overheads involved:
Skip Wagon £35,000+
Skips £500/each for standard builderskip
Vehicle Insurance £2000/year per vehicle
Public Liability £1250/year per vehicle
Employer's Liability £1250/year per vehicle
Skip Wagon driver £25,000/year
Fuel £20,000/year
Office staff £18,000/year per member of staff
Landfill taxes £18/ton increasing by £3 every year until 2010 where it will stand at £35/ton
Soon adds up doesn't it? Getting rid of waste is not a cheap business, but it has to go somewhere!
3. Why isn't my skip dropped off and picked up when I ask for it?
This isn't always the skip company's fault - too many people don't understand that hiring a skip is not like calling a taxi. Just think about what goes into the average skip lorry driver's day - it's heavy haulage we're talking about here, and lots of things can go wrong on a pick-up or drop off that will slow down the whole day's schedule, such as a customer putting toxic waste in a skip, overfilling it, or the driver being given incorrect drop off details by a customer.
We publish a national trade magazine for the industry called "The Skip" (www.theskip.net) and through this we are pushing for more skip companies to incorporate new technology like Vehicle Tracking to improve delivery schedules and take-up of this kind of improvement is increasing all the time.
In the meantime, you should be patient waiting for your skip because it's rarely a case of deliberately bad customer service.
4. Why won't they take the skip away if the rubbish is just over the fill line?
It's not the skip driver being unreasonable - it's the law! They are legally bound to not carry unsafe loads and unfortunately many people order smaller skips than they need in order to save a few quid. Our advice - order a larger skip than you think you need because you will always fill it - just don't go over the line!
5. What actually happens to my rubbish when they take it away?
If you're not asking this question, you should be. Landfill space in the UK is running out fast. It is estimated that by 2010 there will be virtually no landfill space left in Britain and the government is increasing the landfill taxes that waste management companies have to pay every year. The best skip companies are investing heavily into new plant and technology to the point that many of them are recycling over 90%! Using these companies will eventually reduce prices and massively increase recycling rates - something we should all be interested in.
The bottom line is - the cheaper the skip, the less likely it is that the waste is being responsibly managed.
6. Why won't my local skip company take a credit card or even tell me prices over the phone?
This is mainly a historical thing. Most skip hire companies have evolved over the past 25 years from construction and demolition companies, and the traditional way they do business is either by issuing invoices or cash-in-hand! Also, a lot of companies still charge for waste disposal by the tonne and won't always quote an exact price because they don't know exactly how much it's going to cost them to get rid of until it comes in.
7. Why do I get quoted so many different prices for the same service from different companies?
The answer's in the question - you don't get the same service from different companies! You get different levels of service from different companies. Most of the time, you get what you pay for. After you've had a bad experience, you'll wonder whether it really was worth saving £20 by going with the cheapest you could find.
Plus there are other factors such as skip permit prices. All skip companies are supposed to tell you that you need a permit if the skip is to be on a public highway. These permits are provided by the local council - sometimes the company by law has to sort it out for you, sometimes you'll have to go direct to the council yourself.
The variances in skip permit price across the UK are staggering - some council's charge nothing and issue them the same day, some charge £70 and make you wait weeks before issuing.
In the end...
It's up to you. You now know pretty much everything necessary to make an informed choice about which skip hire company to use.
If you want all the guesswork taken out of the job and a guarantee of:
- excellent customer service levels - fully online secure payment system - a free-phone number so it won?t cost you to enquire about anything - responsible waste management and a commitment to recycle at least 70% of waste collected - fixed, published prices - full UK-wide service
Then you could always use http://www.topskips.com. We have over 400 agents throughout the UK that go the extra mile to please our customers because, most of the time, WE are their biggest customer!
One product they end up as are cleaning rags and wipers. Made from recycled clothing and textiles they are an environmentally friendly alternative to disposable paper towels, and are not going to fall apart at the slightest sign of water and can be reused time and time again.
Textiles are sorted and the clothes that can be reused are sent for export. Those that can not be reused due to blemishes or rips are baled together according to garment and grade, and sent to recycling centers to be turned into wipers. In addition to this, textiles are also sourced from commercial laundries that dispose of bed sheets, pillow cases, and tablecloths, when their life is exhausted these make the best lint free wipers for the automotive cleaning industry.
The manufacturing (or recycling) process for all wipers is exactly the same. The textiles are firstly sorted to ensure that they are clean, dry and suitable as a wiper - this basically means that they are cotton rich and therefore absorbent. They are then graded together and sent to a cutting facility where they run along a conveyor belt to be cut into a specified size, dependent upon garment. This produces a wiper of a uniform dimension, which is free from zips, buttons and any other encumbrance.
Specially-built machines are used to ensure clean cut wipers, and once made each wiper is passed through a metal detector for final quality control prior to packaging. Due to the diverse nature of wiping cloths there are a few points to keep in mind when choosing your supplier:
Industrial wipers are sometimes regarded as a 'waste or bi-product' and not all wiper companies take the same time and effort ensure that their grading and quality is of a high standard.
An increasing number of companies simply export clothes for sorting and cutting in Eastern Europe and then import them back into the UK. The environmental footprint of all this haulage is massive. Find a company that does all there sorting and cutting in the country they are destined for reduces the need for long haulage whilst also employing local people.
Industrial wipers offer a valuable means of recycling thousands of tonnes of unwanted clothing and textiles. This must be a better solution to simply throwing away more than 1 million tonnes of textiles into landfill sites. Due to the high carbon footprint associated with the manufacture of cotton based materials - they will conform with and enhance your organisations' eco-friendly policies.
Using?eco friendly removals?isn't just about some half-baked notion of offsetting CO2 emissions or planting a tree. Any company that professes to be green needs to do the best they can to reduce not only carbon emissions, but waste as well. Even if the company you are looking at for your removals isn't setting themselves up as a green company, you can always look for a company who make the effort.
Eco Friendly Removals - What To Look For
Obviously one of the most important aspects of any?eco friendly removals?company is that they have some form of reduced CO2 emission system. This could include using LPG, or Liquid Petroleum Gas. Now, just because a vehicle uses LPG, doesn't mean it's great for the environment. It releases something like a 20 per cent less CO2 over petrol, but is the most available option for most haulage and removal companies.
Similarly, packing material is often a massive cause of waste in house moves. Some companies will collect your waste free of charge, and either reuse of recycle it. In this instance, everyone wins. Taking the right route is also something that an eco friendly removals service should do. It might seem minimal on your run, if the engine is running another couple of minutes, but over the van's lifetime, this has a dramatic effect. Make sure your removal company has satellite navigation to maximize efficiency.
Where To Find Eco Friendly Removals
The best place to look if you're after an eco friendly removals company is a delivery auction website.?The great thing about this is that it's free to use, and will allow you to find exactly the right company for you. Also, because? these companies ?are using return load space, they are going there anyway, so it really helps to reduce CO2 on our roads.
If you're looking for removals companies, try http://www.anyvan.com/removals/ for access to thousands of FREE bids from delivery, courier and removals companies.
Nearly every one of us has had to move something from point A to point B with some significant distance between the two at least one time in our lives. Moving into or out of a home, apartment, or campus dorm are just some of the examples. However, some of us do this on a constant basis, and some of us move more than just the contents of an apartment. For those people heavy haulage is a constant factor in the success or failure of their business. Finding the right company to do this in a given time frame safely can impact the bottom line significantly.
For the purposes of this article, heavy haulage is multi-ton shipments via a long distance system of transport and delivery. This can be by rail, highway, ship or even airplane. While exceptions do exist, typically the shipments are raw materials to be used in a construction environment or waste being taken from the same. Sometimes this is called dryage, which originally meant to transport by a sideless cart.
Typically this service is provided by either a national trucking company or an international brokerage firm. Heavy haulage services includes the shipment of goods to and from the origin point, completion of both inbound and outbound documents, and storage of empty cartons and crates while not in use (which can take up a significant amount of essential space otherwise).
Those companies having need of heavy haulage services typically also need to prepare a place for convenient pickup and delivery. Because of the size of the shipments, parking a long haul semi in the front parking space would be inconvenient and could violate some traffic restrictions depending upon the locality. So this area, commonly known as the dock, is set aside for inbound and outbound traffic. Depending upon the size of the organization employing this service, separate docks may be established as well.
When choosing a heavy haulage service, much more than price has to be considered. It is well and good to get a bargain rate price, but if that comes at the cost of late pickups or drop-offs or the product, and the name of the employing business being spread over the interstate because of an inexperienced or unsafe driver, the cost may be too much to bear. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Regularly checking safety records and recommendations from others in a similar field will help to expose those flaws and make choosing the right shipper as opposed to the cheapest one much easier.
Truckers and haulage drivers have a tough choice sometimes. And while the sweet taste of a juicy breakfast may seem the perfect end to a job well done, a well planned backload from a freight exchange can create more paid work on completion of a job.
Let me explain.
In traditional haulage and freight transportation a trucker gets a delivery, and takes it from A to B (let's say Aldershot to Basingstoke). Trucker gets paid, company get their delivery - everyone's happy.
Except that the trucker has the trip back to their Aldershot to look forward to, and this time without any pay to cover the distance - or dead mileage. It wastes time, it wastes money and it eats into profits - whether the driver is an owner operator or works for a big haulage company.
And this is where freight exchanges come in.
Think of a freight exchange as a dating service for cargo. Freight forwarders post the loads they want to be delivered and the truckers sign up for loads they want to deliver. Then the two parties agree an appropriate fee and the delivery is made.
But how does this help our friend making the lonely journey back from Basingstoke? Simple - if he's aware in advance that he's going to be running empty back to Aldershot that afternoon, he can visit the 'freight dating' scene and look for any freight forwarders looking to send a package from Aldershot to Basingstoke - or any town en route. If he finds a backload (as they are known in the business), the company get their package delivered in a timely manner, the driver cuts down on his time driving unpaid, and the freight forwarder gets their load delivered. Everybody wins - except as mentioned earlier, our haulage driving friend delays his juicy breakfast reward, but life's a compromise.
Freight exchanges are nothing new, and have been around for decades, but as technology develops we're seeing new technologies in the industry, making things even easier. The freight exchanges I represent (Haulage Exchange and Courier Exchange) have their own e-payment system for the quick transfer of invoices, a mobile phone network allowing drivers to be contacted by the freight exchange while on the road and a system of freight alerts which inform haulage companies and owner operators when new loads are posted on the freight exchange which are suitable for them.
It's come a long way from just driving freight from A to B, and no doubt there are some interesting developments for the humble freight exchange in the future.
Luke Humble is the Website manager for The Transport Exchange Group. Their two exchanges, Courier Exchange (http://www.courierexchange.co.uk) and Haulage Exchange (http://www.haulageexchange.co.uk), are two of the UK?s largest and fastest growing independent freight exchanges. The exchanges are neutral, actively managed and with strict quality control to ensure smooth running.
