Working with Reputable Carriers

Companies build their business on the quality of their products and on their reputation. The product Access America Transport sells is reliable transportation. Reliable transportation begins and ends with the brokers, but in the middle, doing the actual moving, are our carriers. Our LTL carriers play an essential role in earning AAT our reputation. Any carrier has the potential to win us a new customer, or cost us a loyal one. So, choosing the right carrier is the biggest responsibility our brokers have.

Here is what a good carriers looks like. A good carrier has a “Satisfactory” safety rating from the DOT and a low safe stat score (the lower, the better - just like golf). Good carriers have general liability, auto liability, worker’s compensation, and cargo coverage from an insurance company who will send a certificate of insurance upon request. Lastly, good carriers are registered with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and have an active carrier authority.

How does Access America Transport know they are using these reputable carriers? AAT has a Carrier Compliance Auditor whose responsibility it is to investigate each carrier we work with. When Access America Transport begins working with a carrier, the carrier must provide AAT with documents that prove the carrier is registered with FMCSA and a certificate of insurance that specifies all of their policy types, numbers, limits, and deductibles. The Compliance Auditor verifies a minimum of one million dollars in auto liability coverage and one hundred thousand dollars in cargo coverage for each carrier. Lastly, the Compliance Auditor researches the carrier’s safety rating and authority status with FMCSA.

That is just the initial investigation. How does Access America Transport know their carriers maintain these qualifications? AAT uses two different web-based services that help us monitor all of these aspects. With the first we register each of our carriers by the number issued to them by FMCSA. It sends us three reports each week of changes to safety rating, authority status, and lapses in insurance reports to FMCSA. These changes are recorded in our system. AAT uses a second web-based service to monitor updates to insurance. This one keeps track of insurance policy numbers, limits, and dates of effect for us, transmits that information directly into our system.

Access America Transport is confident that each carrier we send out is going to provide our customers with superior service. We know this because each carrier has proven themselves to us and continue to do this.