In addition to the case of shipper Unilever’s Newville, Pa., facility, which I wrote briefly about last week, there are plenty other shippers and receivers who do make parking options available to drivers when space allows. Owner-ops who specialize on particular lanes or are dedicated to one customer or another often speak of such arrangements, yet they’re hardly the norm.
At once, in the wake of the ELD mandate coming into effect last December, notes Heartland Express driver Bob Stanton, “the term ‘shipper/receiver of choice’ is getting a lot of traction,” particularly as it relates to load/unload efficiency and the ability to park at least somewhat securely for longer periods when out of hours. “If I’ve got a choice on a well-reviewed customer or a negatively reviewed one – who am I going to choose?”
Stanton, when I spoke to him about this, was working the Mid-America Trucking Show booth for the Dock411 smartphone app/service, which enables such reviewing. Dock411 has been crowd-sourcing and verifying information about loading dock locations all around the nation for the last few years. Free to truckers, within the app users can add information about and comments on more than 100,000 facilities. An update to version three of the app, rolled out just ahead of MATS in March, notes Dock411’s Daniel Serewicz, delivered further on the company’s mission to take trucker-user suggestions as to what kind of information is provided on each location.
Serewicz notes version one provided up to 15-20 attributes on each location within the app, while version three now is capable of “collecting 75 different attributes about each shipper location.”
Also now available is a subscription-based version of the app specifically for shippers, which allows them, depending on the level at which they’re involved, to outline services they offer to truckers, and to promote their unique “D411 ID,” an eight-digit code that can be supplied to app users ahead of arrival to grease the skids on sharing information about dock locations, availability of restrooms, and parking, of course.
Serewicz agrees with Stanton that facilities’ desire to be a “shipper/receiver of choice” is more than just a pie in the sky notion. As the ELD mandate has constrained capacity further than it already had been, they’re asking themselves, “’Do drivers want to come to our facility?’” Serewicz says. “Bad shippers will either pay more” for their transport needs or “be that shipper of choice.”
Now, at least, those truly interested shippers can use the service to find out what truckers are saying about them, and drivers can cross reference what shippers are saying about themselves with what their trucking peers are saying to get a more complete picture.
