In our industry, you don’t need to follow the headlines to be aware of the stress on our supply chain. Reasons and opinions as to why are abundant and range from the opinion that it’s not really a delay in shipping and delivery as much as its strong demand to insufficient labor; driver, or fleet shortages; to backlogs at the ports; and difficulty ramping up inventory levels after pandemic lockdowns from what was previously a just-in-time replenishment model. The list goes on! Pool distribution continues to offer a viable solution for shippers looking to solve their supply chain woes in the near-term and to establish a powerful shipping strategy for the future.
What is Pool Distribution?
Pool distribution services help shippers reduce their shipping costs while enhancing speed and ease of delivery. It’s a shipping strategy, similar to less-than-truckload (LTL) shipping that allows you to ship your product along with other orders in a single truck. However, unlike LTL shipping, pool distribution does not involve sharing the load with other shippers. Instead, your logistics services provider (LSP) pools together multiple shipments of your own product that are to be delivered to multiple destinations within the same geographic area.
Utilizing pool distribution can reduce shipping costs and improve efficiency, making a shipment’s final mile journey to its destination faster and easier.
The pool strategy enables shipments that would normally be shipped through LTL to be pooled or consolidated into a full-trailer-load (FTL) and delivered to a pool distribution center. At the pool distribution warehouse, your freight will be unloaded and organized through a sort and segregate process, otherwise know as a “sort” or “sort and seg”. Boxes may be combined onto pallets and then all shipments are delivered together to their final destinations. The pool distribution strategy gives shippers greater oversight of their product than LTL yet still provides cost-savings.
As we wrote about two years ago in our blog post, The Ins and Outs of Pool Distribution, this shipping strategy continues to gain momentum and has a number of applications in the logistics and transportation industry.
Why Choose Pool Distribution?
For the right shipper, leveraging a pool distribution strategy can significantly cut your shipping costs and improve efficiency. Shippers also have greater oversight of their product when they choose pool distribution over LTL. Finally, many shippers form a lasting relationship with a logistics partner who specializes in pool distribution and create unique, dependable solutions throughout their entire footprint.
So, whether you’re already using an LTL strategy and looking for greater oversight and management of your freight or you’re looking for an improved distribution model to reduce your costs but not compromise on customer success, pool distribution may be the solution for you,
Pace currently offers pool distribution services for our customers in Atlanta, Birmingham, Chattanooga, Dallas, New Orleans, Memphis, Mobile, and Nashville. You can learn more about Pace’s pool distribution services here on our website.