Carrier onboarding means adding a new carrier to your team of carrier service. It’s important as a shipper, employer, or HR manager to make the onboarding process as comfortable as possible for your new carrier without compromising the standards of your company’s policies.
Best Practices To Follow To Ensure Compliance
Onboarding carriers demand a great skill of leadership cooperation and commitment. Most successful shippers can onboard their carriers because they have the required skills and the best practices to follow. Read on here for best practices to follow to ensure compliance in onboarding your carrier.
- Be Focused
Enforcing compliance among carriers requires that customers are focused and maintains a united front. There are 98% of active carriers who agree that compliance is easier with onboarding when the team is focused. This helps ensure that every unit of carriers that works within the company understands the importance of being focused on the assignment and willing participation.
- Have A Procurement Team
It’s important you involve a procurement team when procuring your carriers. This ensures you get the best set of carriers according to your needs, personality, and locality. It also helps shippers mitigate risks as well as ease technical cooperation later.
- Have A Leader
One of the most innovative practices you can adopt for a carrier’s onboarding is to have a leader or at least someone who can be a point of contact between the carriers and the shippers. They can also help in a situation of any form of escalation.
- Communication Is Key
In any organization, communication is vital. With onboarding carriers, smart and successful shippers know this and adapt it very well by constantly maintaining a well-coordinated communication channel. With coordinated and extensive communication channels, you can easily meet with carriers to discuss programs, review processes, and collate status reports.
- Be Action-Oriented
It’s easy to have escalations where there are no repercussions for actions taken. Smart shippers have therefore perfected the skill of operating and acting quickly when there are issues. They have a set of actions that ensures everyone is focused on their work according to schedules and deadlines. There are also repercussions for anyone that creates issues in the team by refusing compliance.
- Be Reflective
It’s always best to reflect and review your own set of operations and techniques. This will give room for improvements. More so, when carriers observe that you’re constantly willing to review your terms and operation, they’ll easily follow your leadership.
- Be Sure Your Goals Are Achievable.
Always make sure your goals are realistic and achievable. You shouldn’t expect your carriers to become experts at compliance from day one. Compliance is a process that takes time, so be sure to give it time. Just ensure you set goals that are realistic each day.
Best Practices To Follow To Make Your Carrier Comfortable During Onboarding
- Acquaint Your Carrier with The Expectations Before His First Day:
It’s normal that your new carrier is nervous on the first day and may want to do so many things to please you. Help them get comfortable with the company’s practices by acquainting them with your expectation even before the first day. Reach out to him via email and let him know what will be expected of him on his arrival to the company. Such email could contain details like the day and time of arrival, expected uniform if there’s one, first task, and location, etc.
- Make Help Available
Because it’s the first day of onboarding, your new carrier definitely has no friend in the organization yet. Most carriers felt like a loner on their first day too. You can assign a friendly and patient colleague with him on the first day to acquaint him and answer any questions he may have.
- Avoid Paper Works
It’s true; there are a lot of paper works to do to complete the hiring process. But you can delay a few ones that aren’t urgent till very much later. Signing and filing a lot of paperwork on the first day could be stressful and unwelcoming for a new carrier.
- Offer A Welcome Service
Having the best and cooperative team sometimes is dependent on how loved your carriers feel. You may want to let your new carrier feel welcome as a family by organizing a welcome service for him. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate. It can just be making sure the active carriers greet the new ones with enthusiasm to make them feel welcome.
- Keep Company’s Process Organized
Keeping your company’s process organized will demonstrate your high level of professionalism. Assign the active carriers to their various locations before the day and book and schedule conferences and training ahead. Demonstrate a high level of employee management, and keep your work environment firm, organized, and professional.
- Update Them About Necessary Training
Your new carrier will need some training on how things operate in your organization. Part of easing them up and onboarding them gracefully includes letting them know how their training process will be handled, when and where it’ll be taking place, etc.
- Request for Feedback
Feedback allows you to know the proper way to onboard a new member the next time. It also lets you see if you were able to onboard your new carrier properly. For a better and improved onboarding process, you should always ask for feedback from your new carrier.
Methods Of Onboarding A New Carrier
Onboarding a new carrier could be tasking, but there are different means of easing the process. Here are the three most used means of onboarding a new carrier.
- The Use Of Application Programming Interface (API)
This method allows your HR to build a connection with your carrier. With this method, it’s easy to transact and receive rates from the carrier. Your carrier is typically in charge of maintaining your rates, route guides, tracking numbers, etc. With the web service application programming interface, you can easily see the end-of-day manifest.
- Integrated System
This method helps your HR to build and enforce carrier compliance. The compliance includes the rates, services, routing guides, shipping labels, tracking numbers, transit times, etc. The integrated system methods will require more time and effort from HR. Nonetheless, some transportation execution provider gives easy onboarding services. These help carriers to become familiar with the time and cost values.
- The Manual Method
This allows you to input your carrier’s data manually. The information to manually request from your carriers includes carriers record, carrier’s full name, SCAC code, customer internal, carrier ‘ship via’ code, account number, carrier services, tracking number generation, carrier rates, negotiated rates- your specific rates per carrier, customer rates ( rates that reflect what you charge your customer), accessorial charges and routing guide are the geographical date that describes the area where each service is available, transit times, certified accredited shipping labels, end of day manifest (carrier close out files generations, report, and transmission. You may also create and use comma-separated value (CSV) files. You can then input the information gathered into your system.
Conclusion
Carrier onboarding practices help a new carrier to feel welcome, be a part of the team and ensure easy compliance. Implementing the wrong practices can negatively affect the whole operation. This is why knowing the best practices to implement is essential. Follow the best practices outlined above to get your carriers on board.
Author: Bryant Currey is a recruitment specialist with over 10 years of experience in the industry. He has worked with many companies by identifying future hiring needs, sourcing candidates, and conducting interviews. He also shares his knowledge by providing seminars and webinars to recruitment teams of different organizations. In his free time, he likes to go surfing on the beach and go camping with his dog Flipper.
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