Beyond Dimensional Freight: Customizing Your Shipping Needs
In the earliest days of trucking, shipping rates were based on weight and most of the shipping was focused on commodities and standard types of products. However, as shipping became an essential part of the way companies did business, a wide variety of types, weights, and sizes of items found their way into the logistics chain. This made just using weight an inefficient measure for pricing shipping needs. Responding to Customer Needs Shipping firms came to find it necessary to balance shipping weights with the volumes of the freight being transported. Each trailer provides a certain cubic size of freight capacity. Efficiently using that capacity is now a top priority. Manufacturers have learned not to “ship air”. Companies such as Ikea lead the way in developing KD or “knockdown” furniture that can be compactly packaged and shipped at the lowest rates. Likewise, the field of packaging has become a science focused on minimizing wasted materials and space. Around