If you love driving, it makes sense to make it your living. Even if a glittering career in motorsport isn’t exactly beckoning you, there’s promise in joining the courier or haulage industry. That step would, however, require you to regularly ship other people’s cargo. Therefore, your security must be tight.
Granted, tightening up that security sufficiently is much easier said than done, as security can lapse in rather unexpected places. Here are just a few ways you could help to plug problematic gaps.
Recruit drivers who meet the right criteria
Naturally, your company’s reliability starts with its staff, but this fact only scrapes the surface of why you ought to be careful which drivers you recruit. Whether you ship electronics, food, apparel or anything else, it could too easily incur damage were an accident to arise during transit. Also, there are available freight forwarders online such as TSL australia that can assist you with shipping services.
Hence, your chosen drivers need not only the relevant driving licenses but also, as Entrepreneur staffer Diana Albertyn explains, training for driving safely in hazardous conditions like storms.
Be careful which transportation partners you choose
You might not quite be handling all of the transportation yourself, at least initially. After all, starting out as a freight brokerage would, as Startups.co.uk explains, be more financially palatable than leaping straight into freight forwarding, which would be a more “hands-on” responsibility.
Therefore, if you rely on transportation partners and intermediaries, select them carefully, as some cargo security experts deem inside information or complicity a factor in many cargo thefts.
Strategically determine shipment routing
On which routes will your shipments be going? Those routes will probably take in plants, warehouses and distribution centers – all of which good examples of shipping points where thieves wait for trucks to leave so that these unscrupulous people can pounce if the vehicle stops again.
IndustryWeek advises that drivers should not stop within the first 200 miles from where they start, as well as other areas where opportunistic thieves are known to spring into action.
Regularly update your security systems and processes
Technology is your friend when it comes to further bolstering the security of your cargo. For this reason, the case is clear why you ought to spend money on vehicle tracking software that would let you monitor your shipments’ locations at any given time.
Besides, security solutions such as this tracking, as well as vehicle immobilization and sophisticated, high-technology security seals, are within easier financial reach than you might have realized. Remember to assess your security tech regularly, as thieves could keep looking for security holes.
Take out goods in transit insurance
In work, just as in life, you can never entirely rule out the possibility of failure, no matter how diligently you try. For this reason, if the worst happened and you did damage or lose cargo while it’s on the move, you would feel better if you at least had goods in transit insurance in place.
However, as different policies can have different limits, so you should make sure you research them before settling on a specific policy.