What is Load Planning: Meaning, Importance and Best Practices

Having a quality product and a lucrative storefront is only one part of a successful business. Businesses need to have strong and highly detailed logistics processes that deploy myriad different techniques for loading, storage, transportation and delivery of products.

That said, planning the storage of goods in a transportation vehicle and ensuring swift deliveries is an even bigger priority for businesses that are looking to maximise profitability. 

Load planning is one such technique that businesses deploy so that they can manage more shipments and their transportation effectively.

Let us start with the definition of load planning, the benefits it offers for businesses, and then look into the components that make up this process.

What is Load Planning?

The process of load planning refers to optimising the utilisation of payload capacity and space in a transport vehicle. 

The aim of this process is to ensure that the maximum number of shipments can be delivered in the minimum number of vehicles, thus reducing the number of vehicles on the road.

While you can guess the immediate benefit - operational efficiency - things are not as simple as stuffing a large number of shipments into a single container. 

Several factors need to be considered for the load planning process to be successful. Load planning is also referred to as load optimisation and offers several benefits for your logistics process.

6 Benefits of Load Planning

After the definition, we would now look at the core benefits offered by load planning, and how to maximise it for your business. As such, there are many benefits you can gain with the help of load planning, but here are some of the top ones that you should know about:

1. Increased Fuel Efficiency

If you have a fleet of vehicles dedicated to your shipments, or even if you have a service provider who owns and manages them, fuel costs are entirely unavoidable. 

Load planning ensures that your goods are distributed optimally among delivery vehicles so that you can reduce the number of trips as well as your transportation costs.

What’s more, a detailed truck loading plan can also help you sequence pickups and deliveries so that your vehicles are optimally utilised. 

This optimal utilisation of your vehicles minimises their wear and tear, which can then reduce your operational costs and help you enable long-term financial gains.

2. Compliance with Regulations and Penalty Prevention

Load planning requires you to plan every aspect of your shipment or fulfilment process quite intricately. 

In that process, you will inevitably end up adhering to the regulations related to weight restrictions and safety standards. 

This compliance will also help you in avoiding penalties and legal liabilities. 

As a result, your brand image will also improve as you are able to portray your commitment to ethical and updated business practices.

For instance, if you have a manufacturing facility, load planning will help you plan and segregate hazardous materials so that you can avoid any fatal reactions. 

You will also be able to prevent any further disasters by adhering to the regulations and restrictions associated with hazmat transport.

3. Improve Safety By Preventing Overloading

Load planning ensures that the weight distribution in a particular transport vehicle is uniform, thus boosting road safety. 

More importantly, by being careful about the weight distribution, you eliminate the possibility of overloading. 

This safe loading process will also help you create a secure working environment for your drivers and other staff members.

For instance, if you are transporting heavy furniture or equipment, you will be able to ensure that all the components are loaded properly and stored securely for the journey.

Load planning will help you not only navigate all of this safely, but also prevent damages by or to your equipment.

4. Achieve Economies of Scale Easily

Economies of scale refers to the cost advantages that you can gain as a business when you deal with volumes wherein the average cost of a unit output decreases, even as your scale increases. 

With load planning, you are dealing with highly specific load configurations that will help you optimally utilise all the cargo space available in a transport vehicle.

Basically, even if you are dealing with much larger volumes that make you operate at a full load capacity, you will be able to do so without bearing additional expenses, thus helping you achieve economies of scale. 

This is the reason behind a lot of eCommerce companies employing load planning in their freight consolidation process.

5. Lower Your Carbon Emissions

Load planning is not just good for your operational efficiency, but also for the impact that your operations can have on the environment. 

Implementing load planning entails planning the most optimised route for your goods, which can cut down on unnecessary mileage and consumption of fuel.

Both these effects can reduce your carbon footprint, and make your business more sustainable and environment-conscious. 

The effect that this can have on your brand image is palpable, while helping you align with your corporate social responsibility goals as a business.

6. Optimisation of Labour Costs

Load planning involves being careful and diligent about every resource you deploy, including materials and personnel. 

As a part of effective load planning, you will go about deploying labour resources from a strategic point of view, and ensure that the ones that are used are efficiently utilised.

With the help of load planning, your business will also be able to forecast the workload required for your cargo loading and unloading operations, and assign appropriate staff accordingly, in a way that would prevent excess or shortage effectively. 

You will also be able to eliminate any unnecessary overheads that you end up incurring due to overstaffing or hiring emergency workers during peak periods.

4 Key Components of Load Planning

Now that you know the many benefits you stand to achieve by adding load planning to your logistics operations, let us look at the most important components that you should consider in a typical load planning process. 

All of the following components combine and come together to create an efficient load planning process:

1. Vehicle Capacity Evaluation

An effective load planning process will help you gain a thorough understanding of the specifications associated with your delivery vehicle. 

This may include payload capacity, interior configurations, load floor height, and volume capacity so that you can plan your load accordingly. 

This knowledge will also help you decide the load placement and make the most of your vehicle capacity.

2. Cargo/Freight Compatibility

In order to ensure that all the goods that you are placing in a transport vehicle are secured during the transportation, you will utilise freight compatibility.  

Also known as cargo compatibility, it refers to the process of grouping similar goods together so that you can prevent any kind of damage. 

Simply put, you will be able to group fragile items together, and heavy objects separately to avoid incompatible goods being placed next to each other, thus ensuring their safe transportation.

3. Load Distribution

Load distribution is perhaps the most crucial part of a typical load planning process. It refers to the process of arranging your goods in a delivery vehicle with the aim of maintaining stability. 

In this process, load planners aim to place the heavier goods lower and close to the centre of the vehicle for increased stability during sudden turns and movements. 

They also use restraints such as tied-downs and straps to prevent goods from shifting or moving too much during the transit.

4. Route Optimisation

When all is said and done, the process of route optimisation will help you ensure that your load planning process performs and delivers to its fullest potential. 

Route optimisation involves finding the most efficient delivery routes for your delivery vehicles based on traffic conditions, availability of drivers, and time windows of preference.

The process of route optimisation is another critical aspect of the load planning process, and will also help you change the sequence of loading or unloading your goods based on the changing demands.

6 Factors to Consider When Planning a Load

When planning your load, you will have to consider multiple factors to ensure that it is managed effectively. 

You will take into consideration the aforementioned route optimisation process to find the optimal route for your delivery vehicle, and choose the most appropriate mode of transportation for your needs.

The following are some of the additional factors that you should consider for the load planning process: 

1. Weight and Dimensions: When planning your load, the weight and dimensions of your goods will be one of the primary factors to consider in the process. This factor will also weigh in when you are deciding the mode of transport.

2. Packaging: For any shipment that you want to send out for your business, there are tons of packaging options for you to choose from. 

Depending on the nature of the goods you are packaging, and the conditions that need to be maintained for them, you will decide the packaging material for it. Do not forget to consider cost as a consideration for this factor.

3. Shipping Containers: You may have packaged your goods properly with the right materials, but they will fail to protect the goods, if you do not transport them in the right shipping containers. 

Choosing containers is a part of a well thought-out loading plan for containers. This makes the type of shipping containers an important consideration in a container load plan.

4. Timing: Before you start planning the load containing multiple goods, you should consider the delivery times associated with them. 

1. When should the goods be delivered? 

2. What time should they be shipped? 

This will help you in the process of grouping the right set of goods together for a specific batch of shipment, also known as groupage freight.

5. HAZMAT: Another factor of consideration that you should keep in mind during the load planning process is HAZMAT. Basically, you ask yourself: Are there any HAZMAT or goods in the shipment? 

If yes, they will have specific shipping requirements and should not be grouped with non-hazardous goods. 

The answer to this will also help you decide the kind of transportation vehicle you will need for the goods.

6. Insurance: As a business owner, you will be dealing with an array of goods that may contain valuable as well as non-valuable goods.

Regardless, you should insure these goods so that you do not have to incur financial loss in case of a damage or loss to these goods. 

Having insurance for your goods will also help you ensure that the receiver of goods can be compensated appropriately in case of a mishap related to the goods.

For your load planning process to truly deliver the way you think, you need to deploy a combination of all these factors. 

Together they will determine how effective your load planning process actually is for your business.

What Does a Load Planner Do?

A load planner does exactly what the term indicates. They take complete responsibility of organising and optimising the load within a specific allocated space. 

A load planner can be designated to plan the load for a transport vehicle such as truck or shipping operations container, or even a warehouse depending on the requirement.

Beside this core responsibility, a load planner will also need to fulfil the following primary responsibilities as a part of their job role:

1. Ideal Load Configuration: When you are optimising the space required for your goods, you should consider multiple factors in the process. 

As a load planner, you need to check the weight distribution requirements based on the capacity of your container within your container load planning process.

You will also need to ensure that the items do not topple during transit  and that the weight distribution is in line with the prescribed guidelines.

2. Better Allocation of Resources: Load planners have to ensure that they manage and allocate resources effectively. 

For this, you will need real-time data on delivery vehicles, labourers on duty, and appropriate delivery charts.

Load planners generally utilise software to access all this data, and can use the process to ensure efficient utilisation of resources. 

After all, excessive resources can strain your operational budget.

3. Communication and Coordination: As a load planner, you will need to facilitate clear and seamless communication and coordination within the team. 

This includes communication with crucial stakeholders of the process, warehouse personnel, and transportation teams. Unless you have a separate manager handling all of this, the onus of this communication falls on the load planner.

4. Maintaining Records and Documentation: Carrying out load configuration properly requires you to maintain a tedious amount of records accurately. 

It will require you to analyse item details, weights, tracking numbers, shipping labels and any other specific information related to your goods.

A load planner must record all of these details and maintain proper documentation to prevent any expensive shipping mistakes.

5. Continuous Improvement: Load planning processes are rarely perfect, let alone be following a fixed blueprint. 

A typical load planning process will require you to follow a cycle of continuous improvement with constant feedback and improvement of performance. 

Load planners can also enable this with the help of appropriate monitoring and feedback management systems. 

In addition to this, load planners should consider the recent trends so that load efficiency and operational costs can be optimised.

Manual Load Planning vs. Automatic Load Planning

By now, you must have a detailed understanding of how load planning works and the contributions it has in your overall logistics process. 

But in case you didn't know it yet, there are two approaches to load planning that you should consider before settling on one.

With that in mind, let us compare manual load planning with automatic load planning, so that we can understand the differences that make one of these approaches perfect for your business processes.

 

As mentioned in the table above,  there is no one ideal approach towards load planning for your business. 

You must consider the scale of operations in your business, the size of your business, and analyse your requirements so that you can choose the right approach of these two methods.

5 Load Planning Best Practices You Should Consider

Since we have already discussed everything we can about the load planning process, let us get more actionable. 

Here are some of the best practices that you should consider following for your load planning process:

1. Prioritise Freight Consolidation

As a business owner, you may fall victim to the thinking that you have nothing to worry about if you are dealing with smaller shipments. 

But these seemingly small shipments can quickly rack up plenty of expenses for your businesses if you are not careful. 

Consolidating shipments in containers is a proven, and cost-effective way to optimise load planning as it reduces the total number of shipments.

What’s more, you can also save a significant amount of money that you might otherwise spend in labour, overhead, and fuel costs. 

You can also take these savings to the next level by consulting carrier and freight forwarders to figure out which kind of loading approach will be more beneficial for your business. 

2. Implement Efficient Stacking Techniques

Consider implementing stacking techniques that will help you maximise your storage utilisation strategically. 

In this regard, you can consider freight dimensions, weight distribution, and load stability among other things to achieve optimal stacking.

Moreover, you can also consider different kinds of stacking techniques such as block stacking, interlocking or pyramid stocking based on the goals that are important to your business. 

These techniques are known to minimise your storage space, prevent damages, and enable stable load structures.

There are additional techniques that you can combine with stacking to achieve best results, but this technique is always a good starting point.

3. Associate With Multiple Supply Chain Partners

You know what they say about putting all your eggs in one basket, right?

The same adage applies to your supply chain processes, wherein if you are completely dependent on one partner for all of it, you might experience the brunt of it sooner or later.

While effective communication and collaboration between businesses and shipping partners should prevent any logistics process from going wrong, it is good to have a backup if your business is highly dependent on these processes.

You will be able to enable optimal load planning by sharing crucial information such as shipment volumes, delivery schedules, and inventory levels. 

You will also be able to facilitate load optimisation across several transportation modes, and enhance your overall efficiency by associating with multiple supply chain partners.

4. Optimise Your Delivery Routes

We have talked plenty about route optimisation for you to know how crucial this part of the load planning process is. 

However, it is important to keep in mind that optimising your delivery routes will also help you meet several criteria and fulfil your deliveries efficiently. You can consider the delivery windows, availability of the drivers, and other factors to optimise the routes. 

You also have the option of automating your route optimisation process with a software tool to prevent any kind of errors and boost efficiency even further.

5. Consider Vehicle Constraints

You can do everything right, but none of it would work if you do not take a tailored approach towards load planning of a specific shipment. 

Load planning is rarely a one-size-fits-all kind of a strategy and will require you to consider a combination of several factors so that you can create the optimal strategy for your shipment.

One of the factors that is crucial here is vehicle constraints. Imagine carrying out the whole load planning strategy around refrigerated cargo, only to realise while loading that the truck that you have selected does not have the facility. 

To avoid this scenario, vehicle constraints should weigh in as a factor when planning your load.

As a result, you will be able to plan the right amount and kind of goods for a specific container and even transportation vehicle without wasting further time and resources.

How to Choose the Right Load Planning Software?

Phew! As you might realise now, load planning requires a lot of hard work, planning and decision-making. 

We completely understand if you find yourself overwhelmed or in dire need of technological support. 

If you find yourself in this situation, it is time for you to consider purchasing and implementing a load planning or logistics software.

But there are a plethora of tools claiming to be the best load planning tool or software out there today. How will you choose the right one for your business?

Well, here is a list of factors that you should consider when purchasing a load planning software for your business:

1. Algorithms Deployed for Optimisation

2. Vehicle & Freight Compatibility

3. Optimisation of Routes

4. Real-Time Integration of Data

5. Regulatory Compliance

6. User-Friendliness and Flexibility

7. Scalability

8. Reporting & Supply Chain Analytics

9. Integration With Existing Systems

10. Quality of Customer Support & Assistance

11. Alignment with Budget

Depending on your business, its requirements and viability, use a combination of these aforementioned factors to pick the right load planning software for your business. 

The right tool will help your load managers carry out the process without any mistakes, and ensure that crucial data is always at their fingertips.

Concluding Remarks

Load planning is a crucial strategy to consider for any business that deals with a large volume of shipments or a complicated logistics process. 

With load planning, you can ensure that all your goods are packaged optimally in the right transportation vehicle with minimal wastage of any resource or personnel.

Ensure to follow the best practices listed in this guide so that your load planning strategy is poised for success. 

If you are looking for extra assistance on your logistics process, and are considering association with a seasoned logistics company, contact PACK & SEND. 

Get a quote tailored to the specific requirements of your business.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is load planning?

Load planning is the process of optimising and rearranging goods to fully utilise the space within a transportation vehicle. 

More specifically, this process entails consolidating your cargo so that you can maximise the carrying capacity of each truck or transportation vehicle. 

When done successfully, this ensures that you are able to send out multiple shipments in a single transport vehicle.

What is a cargo loading plan?

A cargo loading or unloading plan refers to a document that details how the goods contained in a specific shipment should be handled. 

The document will contain several important details including clear details such as quantity of cargo, and the respective hold numbers to be loaded or unloaded.

How to optimise load planning?

In an effective load planning strategy, you will include stacking techniques to fully utilise the available space, and a combination of other techniques that will help you increase load capacity without compromising on your safety standards.

You will consider a combination of factors such as freight dimensions and weight, load stability and more to come up with the right load planning strategy.

What does a load planner do?

A load planning is the person who is completely responsible for planning load for a specific transport vehicle, container or even a warehouse. 

A load planner will utilise data, and ensure that each shipment you send out is a part of a comprehensive load planning strategy. 

The load planner will then come up with the optimal route for these shipments.