I think you can argue that what’s changed is that companies are having to pay really close attention to their empty miles, not only because with rising fuel costs they’re a drag on their bottom line, but because if they don’t, they’re at a competitive disadvantage. I mean, if you’re running 14% empty and your competitors are running 11% empty, then you’re going to lose because they’re more profitable. Becoming more efficient really comes down to a matter of survival.

I think it’s actually better to have fewer lanes that have higher density, than more lanes with higher levels of empty miles. So losing lanes with bad density ratios allows you to take empty miles out of the system and any time you can reduce empty miles, you’re putting money in your pocket.

You can look at freight as a bell curve. At some point in the middle I make my average amount of profit. On the far right of the bell curve I make my most profit and on the far left, my least. So it seems intuitive that you’d want to wipe out the low end of the bell curve. The problem with that theory is that sometimes the freight at the low end of the bell curve is essential to getting the good freight on the high end of the bell curve.

So another way to look at it is to look for the opportunity – to recognize that you have a density problem and use it as motivation to your sales and marketing team to go out and look for shippers in those lanes in order to improve my network.

What those lanes are doing is giving you a road map of how you should strategically attack the marketplace; where you should be selling to find more freight – not that you should give up on those lanes, at least until you’ve exhausted your sales efforts to bulk up those lanes with new shippers.

What you want to ideally do is connect your lanes in the most efficient way possible in order to reduce, because you can never eliminate, your empty miles. As an example, if I’ve got a good freight mix, then once I drop my load in Miami, I’ll have a load that’s taking me out of Miami to where my next head haul market is. So what you’re really trying to do is connect the lines between the loads so you can minimize the empty miles in between them.

You can’t expect a customer to pay more because of your X and Y problems. You’re going to have to make yourself competitive in that lane. In order to be competitive in that lane, you’re going to have to work on your freight mix. Either you shouldn’t be bidding on a lane where you don’t have enough density, can’t get enough backhauls for. Or if you do decide you want to bid on that particular lane, you should look for additional shippers to fill any gaps in the bottom line numbers associated with that lane. At the end of the day, shippers are going to go with carriers that provide good service at a fair price.

What it comes down to can be summed up in one word…optimization. If you have six drivers and six loads, you have over 700 different ways you can assign those loads. So what you need to figure out is the best way to allocate those loads to the power units, because assigning the closest driver to each load doesn’t guarantee the lowest number of empty miles. You really need to think outside the box, or get optimization software that can think outside the box for you.

If you really commit to using the software, you can expect an increase of a couple hundred miles of extra utilization per truck per week, as well as a decrease of approximately 10% in the number of empty miles across the board.