Best Practices for FTL and LTL Trucking

‘What if it doesn’t reach there on time?’ ‘How do I keep costs manageable?’ ‘Is there a way to know what’s happening to my shipment without being kept waiting?’

Whether your business is online or not, shippers face logistical challenges such as balancing logistics costs with increased consumer demands. This also holds true for those who use cross-border trucking to regularly ship between Singapore and Malaysia. But are there any best practices to reduce damage while managing costs and logistics speed for this lane?

Knowing what your shipment can and cannot compromise on:

Logistics planning always involves trade-offs. Even when it comes to trucking, it can be difficult to balance costs and speed, but knowing what you absolutely cannot sacrifice can help to narrow down your choices.

As we’ve covered in our Full-truckload vs Less-than-truckload (FTL vs LTL) article, FTL shipments tend to be faster when it comes to line-haul journey onwards as the truck won’t need to wait for consolidation with other shippers’ goods before the delivery, unlike LTL shipments. FTL shipments, if they are going to a single destination, don’t need to stop at terminals after clearing destination customs. LTL shipments require distribution before each shippers’ orders are sent for their last-mile deliveries.

As for costs, LTL can be a more cost-effective option as you’ll only be paying for how much space you use in the truck but can be slower for the reasons highlighted above. Knowing whether you cannot compromise on costs or speed will help you determine which trucking mode suits your current shipment best.

You could also work with a freight forwarding company who can help provide you with recommendations on which cross-border trucking type works best for all your shipments, and can help to organise and optimise your trucking shipments in terms of costs and speed.

Packing tips for reducing damage:

Items could bounce around during the journey. Good packaging and palletizing can help to reduce the risk of items getting damaged during transit.

For larger shipments, palletizing can make handling easier but is not absolutely necessary. If you are using FTL shipments, ensure that you use angle bars, also known as edge protectors, on your palletised shipment to further secure your shipments.

For smaller shipments, such as boxes or crates for LTL shipments, ensuring that your items have sufficient padding and won’t bounce around during the journey will help reduce costs due to damaged goods. You can determine the right packing materials and packing methods by assessing your item requirements below:

To find out more packaging tips like these for parcels or boxes, check out our packaging guide.

Shipment Monitoring and Tracking

If you’ve worked with multiple B2B shipping partners before, you may have experienced needing to wait for calls from one of your shipping partner to get status updates on your current shipments.

Having full visibility over all your trucking shipments and B2B shipments in one place can alert you to when any issues arise with your shipments. Even better is when the platform allows you to communicate with your shipping partner directly on the shipment that needs attention itself.

If you work with Janio, you’ll have access to our B2B shipment portal, giving you the transparency and ease of use when it comes to tracking your shipments, be they trucking or otherwise. To find out the other features of our portal, check out our recent product update.

Ensuring customs clearance documents are prepared

Having your shipment stuck at customs will throw a wrench into anyone’s supply chain.

When it comes to cross-border trucking, customs clearance happens at the border checkpoints of each country. As opposed to air freight and sea freight where its likely that your shipping partner has facilities at the airport and sea port they operate at, cross-border trucking doesn’t have this benefit.

The customs clearance documents you’ll usually need for cross-border trucking shipments are:

• Commercial Invoice
• Packing List
• Waybill
• Relevant import permits and licenses depending on the items being imported or exported

Having a clear line of communication with your shipping partner on what you’re shipping and working with them to have all your documents ready before the shipment can go a long way in minimising the chances of your shipments getting stuck at customs.

Having something go wrong with your cross-border trucking shipment is never nice, but by implementing some of these best practices you can minimise the chances of these happening to you. One final thing you can do is to work with cross-border trucking and freight forwarding experts like Janio who can help you reliably truck between Malaysia and Singapore and also help you track and monitor your b2b shipments.

If you’d like to request a quote or chat with us to find out more about what we do, click the banner below to reach out to us: