As much as some truckers love to complain about the business climate, it’s getting harder to ride that soapbox lately. The fact is, there’s good reason to believe these are happier times. Truckers of all sorts — 5,000-truck fleets, 50-unit niche carriers, and independent owner-ops — have successfully tipped the expense side of the balance sheet back their way.

Tight capacity has returned power to the service provider, and what some call “maturing between carriers and shippers” has allowed for rate increases all along the supply chain. At the same time, it’s been all but impossible for shippers to ignore the so-called “perfect storm” of overlapping cost increases –everything from fuel price hikes to border delays, to lost revenue due to hours-of-service regulations.

That doesn’t mean general increases work for every sector or every operation. Neither does it indicate that carriers that can’t or choose not to implement across-the-board rate hikes are being left out. In many cases, carriers are opting for more flexible, creatively applied accessorial rate structures — either as an alternative to, or in conjunction with, rate hikes. And their customers are buying in.

Accessorial charges, or “behaviour-based pricing,” as one large U.S. carrier dubs the practice, have generally been more associated with LTL operations. But now they’re piquing the interest of the truckload crowd. Not only are truckload operators trying to recoup lost revenue, they’re worried about drivers being financially hurt by dock waiting time, which now must be logged as on-duty time thanks to new U.S. hours of service rules.

J.B. Hunt, the Lowell, Ark.-based fleet of 8,000 tractors, recently adopted a system that tailors pricing to a shipper’s “behaviour.” Hunt offers incentives to customers who can turn trucks around quicker at the dock, keep pick-up and delivery windows open longer or agree to “no-touch” contracts and increased drop-and-hook conversions. At the same time, they hold accountable customers who don’t comply.

“It’s kind of an a-la-carte thing for the customer,” says Terry Matthews, J.B. Hunt’s vice-president of sales. “After one hour at the dock, they can choose to hold (the truck) and pay, or choose to change their behaviour and not pay. So we have shippers now thinking it through, as to whether they’re going to put systems in place or whether they want to turn it into a drop situation.”

Time and money lost at shippers’ docks are what propelled the LTL sector to implement accessorial charges long before the HOS change. And it wasn’t because drivers wasted time idling at shipping and receiving yards. Rather, it was because the drivers were far too active.

“The [problems] are compounded in LTL with all the requests for added services,” says Allan Robison, president and chief executive officer of Reimer Express Lines in Winnipeg. “For example, they want you to provide a lift gate or forklift. They want [the driver] to stack [skids] in a certain area, or they want the blue ones over here and the yellow ones over there, and whatever else. … They want you to come between 9:00 and 9:01 a.m., or deliver in some rural area in the evening.

“These are things that you would not call the normal course of business, and [the industry] was giving them away for free. But there’s a maturing now, and we’re starting to see shippers pay for those kinds of things.”

There’s another reason behaviour-based pricing appeals to LTL carriers. It means their entire client base doesn’t have to subsidize the costs that you incur because of only a few less-than-perfect customers. “The issue for LTL is heightened as a result of cross-subsidization,” says Robison. “We don’t want that anymore, where you have one or a handful of shippers carry the others, or on the other hand, cause a problem for the others. Behaviour-based pricing, therefore, is a good name for it.”

The ability of carriers to pinpoint the cost of each piece of freight per lane and adjust charges accordingly has never been more important — particularly because the customer is now listening to service providers who produce sensible cost-per-mile math.

Bob Gauthier, president of 16-truck overnight specialist Seaway Express, says he recently began recouping costs by charging a flat rate of 10 pounds per cubic foot rather than actual weight per skid. On top of that, he’s begun to go after additional charges for waiting time and extra services — and not necessarily on behalf of his drivers, who all get paid by the hour.

“While drivers who get paid by the mile have a vested interest in delays, some who get paid by the hour do not,” says Gauthier from his Cornwall, Ont., office. “They’re less likely to bring it up, so now it’s up to us as a company to pay close attention to time-in and time-outs.”

As for customer compliance, you can put Gauthier in the camp of carriers who see invoices come back with less and less red ink these days. He estimates that in 2003, about 10 per cent of total revenue recovered was in the form of accessorial charges. That’s compared to only 3 per cent recouped in 1999.

“What used to worry me five years ago doesn’t bother me anymore, which was that my competitor is not charging for something and getting away with it,” he says. “There’s always the customer that’s going to switch carriers as soon as they get the first bill. But what we’re seeing is that they’re starting to run out of carriers that will do every little thing they want for nothing. So now they’re coming full circle. Many of them end up calling back because they’re finding the same thing everywhere they go.”

Blair Johnston is logistics manager for Alcan Cable, a Mississauga, Ont.-based producer of electrical cables. He acknowledges the need for some accessorial charges and he too would like to see faster turnaround times at the dock. But he also resents the stopwatch mentality of some truckers.

“We do try to get trucks in and out as fast as possible, but you have to take into account the human side of it,” says Johnston. “We want the driver and dock (workers) to interact and get to know each other so if there are problems they can work it out themselves, without it developing it into a bigger issue than it needs to be, which can take even longer to resolve. We don’t have robots there, after all.”

But if shippers expect their transport providers to become more sophisticated in justifying rates, then they must also take into account the same factors when building prices for those that receive the goods. “I’m telling all our service providers that if they do have any problems at our customers’ delivery facilities, I want to know about it,” says Johnston. “If it’s going to bring costs down for everyone, then why wouldn’t all involved be more proactive, and communicate more clearly when discussing prices?”