For every logistics organization that believes it is better to specialize in one aspect of the delivery chain, there are as many who prefer to offer dedicated fleet services to ensure the best shipping of goods from the original location all the way through to final delivery.
Will the Benefits Increase Your Business?
By managing trailers, drivers, tractors and a variety of other resources to carry out your operations, will you gain all of the necessary benefits to improve your on-time delivery performance? Are you going to be able to reduce your transportation costs and guarantee capacity, when it suits your business?
Dedicated fleet services may have a collection of resources that become used less often when delivery seasons are not as busy. This may affect you across all the network’s lanes as you try to build your business to capacity across the difficult trading seasons.
The implementation of dedicated fleet services may help you reduce your overall costs when you compare the overheads of geographical problems and expensive lanes.
The financial differences can be assessed when you compare sending a high number of loads across a variety of lanes. Where local deliveries will need to complete full loads every day, cross-country or regional deliveries can benefit when a dedicated fleet can move as little as one load each week, providing they have organized the backhaul efficiently.
Without the backhaul opportunity managed efficiently, long haul and regional deliveries become very expensive and the cost of administering and managing a dedicated fleet may become prohibitive.
In practice, fleet operations often involve multi-stop deliveries. Any empty space within the trucks can be shared or sold to smaller businesses to ensure that all parties benefit.
While some organizations prefer to offer a complete fleet service, because they believe it increases their branding and benefits to customers, it is the consistent bottom line of the operation that provides the most important result.
