Continuously invests in shipping equipment for guaranteed capacity and visibility

When demand for capacity increases, so does demand for equipment. And when every pound and inch matters, the right equipment becomes even more essential to maximize intermodal capacity. Unfortunately for shippers and intermodal carriers alike, rail companies focus more on optimizing their networks than they do supporting them with intermodal shipping equipment.

Chassis

It’s important to leverage an intermodal carrier that owns and maintains its own inventory of intermodal shipping chassis. Shippers should avoid working with intermodal carriers that rely on a shared chassis pool, as there is uncertainty in equipment availability, consistency and reliability.

Availability: In the shared pool, the demand is often greater than the supply. If there aren’t enough chassis available at the ramp, product will sit, causing costly delays.
Consistency: Chassis have varying weights — up to a 700-pound difference between models. To avoid fines, shippers have to assume that they’ll get a heavy chassis, which limits the payload. Schneider has a standard chassis that is 700 pounds lighter than the lightest chassis in the shared pool. This allows customers to move up to 46,000 pounds of product — up to a 10% increase in payload .
Reliability: The shared pool doesn’t guarantee peak operating condition of its chassis, making breakdowns a common occurrence. A provider with owned assets, like Schneider, is more vigilant with monitoring the maintenance of its chassis fleet. Issues are identified and repairs made before they become too costly to fix — or need to be replaced altogether. For Schneider, specifically, it has a maintenance presence at almost all of its rail lamps, maintaining a 97% availability on chassis. Additionally, Schneider has approximately 100 service trucks that visit rail facilities and customer locations. This allows Schneider to have first priority of repairs, instead of having to call a vendor for repairs.

Uncertainty around chassis use may lead to unnecessary fees, delays and accidents.

Shipping containers

Strategic shippers using intermodal should prioritize providers that heavily invest in their own shipping containers. It’s a sign of assured freight capacity, as well as increased care in ensuring no goods are damaged along the way.

The size of freight containers can greatly impact the cubic capacity of the load and overall transportation costs. Cubing out is common, but pinwheeling pallets can increase the capacity of the load. A pinwheeled configuration is when the direction of every other pallet is altered. A common interior container width is 98 inches, which leads to cubing out sooner. However, transportation providers with containers that have more than 100 inches of interior width more easily allow pinwheeling. This increases the amount of freight moved per load and decreases transportation costs due to fewer overall loads moved. Schneider’s intermodal containers are 53 feet long with an interior width of 100.375 inches — easily accommodating the needs of shippers looking to maximize their loads.

24-7 tracking

Another critical piece of equipment for safely and efficiently moving freight is the use of satellite tracking for door-to-door visibility. As the supply chain becomes more complicated, the importance of real-time visibility cannot be overstated. These days, it’s becoming less of a nice-to-have and more of a must-have.

Complete freight visibility for intermodal moves is harder to achieve, making it a true differentiator when a transportation provider can deliver that clear line of sight into freight’s status. The key benefits for shippers include real-time, pertinent details regarding delivery status, delays and pending penalties. An intermodal transportation provider should be embracing GPS tracking technology to achieve complete asset visibility for improved security and mitigated risk of lost equipment. In connection with an API, automatic order updates can be sent, eliminating status concerns and the need for freight status requests.

Schneider FreightPower^®, an online marketplace for instant access to capacity, is available for intermodal loads, allowing shippers to independently quote, book and track a load. This provides complete freight management and visibility with 24-7 tracking and notifications.

Having real-time analytics available helps shippers optimize intermodal operations, further enhancing their supply chains.

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