All right, guys. Thank everyone for joining us right now. We are going to go over commercial vehicle weight, your gross vehicle weight for a commercial vehicle. Now, we've went over this like a million times till we have all confused ourselves. So let's just get the basics here. And we're not going to overcomplicate this thing And let's just go from here. So let's start one at a time. Just keep the answer simple. If you don't understand, we'll try to break it down where you can understand it. So we have here the steer axle, the drive axle, and the tandem axle. Now, I can't see... could be wrong but I can't see or envision any of you guys driving a semi truck so that's not the reason we're learning this you're having to learn this because you're going to get calls from this from uh drivers that will and all they're going to do is call you and say hey I'm overweight that's probably going to be the way they start the conversation off and in your mind you're going to be saying what does that mean you know and and probably from the frustration of them being overweight is where they're just going to come out and say hey I'm overweight I went to the shipper the bol says the dispatch says I'm going to be forty thousand pounds the the bol says I'm forty thousand pounds but actually I'm Eighty one thousand pounds. Let's just say let's just use the number eighty one thousand pounds. So he's frustrated because let me tell you potentially what the situation can be. OK, he's at the shipper. He's gotten loaded right now. They don't have a scale on their yard where they can where he can weigh his truck and the next truck stop where he can actually scale out the termination. The term used to scale out his truck. is maybe an hour away he's in the middle of nowhere so he's driven an hour from the shipper got loaded took off and now he finds out he's overweight he's overweight on his gross now we have all learned what the maximum weight limits are right Okay. What's the maximum weight limit for a tandem axle? Christine, what's the maximum weight limit for a tandem axle? Thirty-four thousand pounds. Okay. All right. Vanessa, what's the maximum weight limit for your drives? Can't hear you. Also, thirty four thousand pounds. OK, thirty four thousand pounds. So that leaves how much for your steer axle? That's twelve thousand pounds. OK, now. OK, so that leaves twelve thousand for the steer, right? Or the tractor. So how do we get at this number? Eighty thousand pounds. First of all, how do we get to this number? The government has said eighty thousand pounds. Now we're talking about a fifty three foot tractor. drive-in trailer okay your maximum weight can be eighty thousand pounds what makes up those numbers we basically already just said it but I just want to make sure you guys know so we we basically um sum up all of the the things there so for example the drive axle would be thirty four thousand pounds plus the thirty four thousand pounds of the tandem that would make you of six to eight thousand pounds plus the twelve thousand pounds of the steer axle and also the commodities of the trailer itself awesome awesome and you guys as dispatchers have to know that the gross vehicle weight is exactly what it says it's the gross it's a combination of your tractor your trailer, the cargo you have inside the trailer. So it's a combination of all those things and it cannot exceed eighty thousand pounds. Your drive and your tandem axles, your drive cannot exceed thirty four, your tandem cannot exceed thirty four. And that leaves how much for your steer? Twelve. Now, it can always be less. If it's less, it's good. But that's the max that we can have. So now what are the options for the driver? OK, he's eighty one. Now, remember, he's over on his gross. Eighty one thousand pounds. What are his options? I'll float some cargoes. That's his option. so he literally either he's going to be an outlaw and keep it moving down the road and take the risk of uh getting a violation of being overweight or he's going to take it back to the shipper and let them rework this load now it's the shipper's responsibility they do this every day for a living right so they should know how to evenly distribute the weight within this trailer they should know okay I've got a heavy item here Maybe I should put a light item here, put another light item here, put a heavy item here, and then put another light item here to make the weight distribution even. That's their job to know that. But they make mistakes. And typically, guys, keep this in mind. The majority of the mistakes in faulty weight distribution in a truck are made after hours and on weekends. Remember that that's when you'll have the most issues with a truck being loaded the wrong way and his only option is to take this back and have them rework the load now in my case when that used first of all this rarely happened to me because as a driver most of the time you know from how your truck pulls off from that shipper if you're overweight you know by how you know your truck like the back of your hand so you know How your truck is pulling. If it's overweight, I did because I would, I would get loaded. I would pull off, I would get down the street or before I even left the parking lot. Sometimes I'd say, Hey man, something's not right. My truck's not pulling right. I'm overweight somewhere. I don't know where, but I'm overweight at that point. I would not know if it's the drives or the tandems. Now at that point, they could either take something off or they could try to rework it or do whatever. If they didn't and I had to go somewhere, scale out, if I was overweight and I come back, you're going to have to pay me for those miles. You're going to have to pay me something. We're going to have to redo that, rework something, because I already told you I felt like I was overweight. It's your job to know how to distribute the weight within the trailer. A lot of drivers get frustrated at that, you know, because that's an issue kind of out of their control. But on the other hand, now, if they get loaded, the truck stops right down the road, like right around the corner or a mile or two down the road, and they scale out and they're overweight, then They have to go back and get it reworked. There's no excuse to ride overweight like that. There's no excuse to ride overweight period because you're breaking the law. So you have to try to figure something out to get back to that shipper. And that's one of the details. uh of the dispatch instructions that we have to make sure that we know what the weight is now we haven't personally put the cargo on the trailer so things like this are out of our control but if we tell the driver it's thirty four thousand you know that's what he's going to be expecting it to weigh plus or minus just a little but he's not going to be expecting you know to be overweight in that process or if we tell him it's forty thousand so Usually, guys, if you take the weight of the trailer, the weight of the tractor, and he can only be eighty thousand pounds as a dry van, usually they only have forty five thousand pounds that they can allow on the cargo. Most drivers do not want to even get close to that number because you're taking a chance. I used to try to be around thirty five thousand or less. And I would do that for fuel reasons and things like that. The heavier you are, the more fuel you will burn or your fuel, your truck burns. My truck used to average right around eight point five miles to the gallon. when I was loaded. If I was empty, I'd average almost ten miles to the gallon. And in business, I tried to keep up with those things. I tried to keep my truck maintained well enough where I could maintain those fuel averages and therefore I could maximize my earning potential. So it was very important for me to be as light as I can. Some people don't care. You know, if you're hauling oversize equipment or if you're doing heavy loads, then of course you expect to be heavy. Because that's where you're making your bread and butter as far as money is concerned. Okay. Um, so if a driver, what's the first thing you're going to ask him, if a driver calls you and say, Hey, I'm overweight, Irwin, what's the first thing you're going to ask him? Oh, he says I'm overweight. That's all he does. He says, Hey man, I'm calling you to let you know. Hey man, I'm at the shipper and I'm overweight. What are you going to say? I'm going to ask, what's your total gross? OK. OK. Before you even do that, before you start getting into numbers and he gives you numbers back and forth, just ask him where. Yeah. If he says I'm overweight, just ask him where. It doesn't seem like that's the correct way to talk or the correct grammar. But we're talking to truck drivers. That's how we communicate with each other. So if he says, hey, man, I'm overweight, just ask him where. Where are you overweight? Are you overweight on your drives? You're overweight on your tandems, on your steers, your gross. It could be any combination of these things. Now, hopefully he won't be overweight here because you have less wiggle room to work with if you're overweight here. I've had instances where the weight was so close that I had to watch how much fuel I put in my truck in order to legally carry the load. I couldn't even top off. We call it topping off your tanks. I couldn't top off my tanks. I had to run with a half a tank of fuel and then refuel with another half a tank because I was close to being overweight here because of how the weight was distributed here. So The shippers are supposed to know this, guys. They're supposed to know how to load these trucks. But like I said, new people, they have new hires that they're training. Sometimes things fall through the cracks. Night shifts sometimes. Weekends are especially horrible because a lot of these shippers and a lot of these companies sometimes have a weekend crew. And those shifts sometimes, tend to be less supervised. So you'll have issues at that time. But remember how we come up with the weight, thirty four, thirty four, twelve. Now, those are the maximum limits. But of course, it can be less. And so how this affects you, you'll get those questions from, you know, or those statements from the drivers about weight. So you want to know. A little bit. about it so that's why we're going over this you don't have to go in depth because you're not a driver your job is to find them loads your job is to give them as much as much information as you possibly can and then go from there uh but it's always best if we can know a little bit about what the driver has to go through on the road so uh and that's one of the things how we try to be different here at uh elic bpo solutions is that we try to understand you know even in our dispatching that's why we do our dispatching a certain way we try to understand what the driver has to deal with on a daily basis so tashi What's the maximum amount of weight I can be on my tandem axles. Um, the max on my trailer, on my trailer. Yeah. The maximum for the trailer is for the drive axle. It's supposed to be thirty four thousand pounds. And also for the tandem, it's about thirty four thousand pounds. Okay. That's the maximum. Are you sure? yeah well but combining it with the um tractor itself which is waiting uh about twelve thousand pounds um these all combined gross weight is eighty thousand okay yeah okay all right all right what if the driver tells you I'm overweight here on my drives without getting in without getting too complicated what are you going to ask him if he says hey man my gross is fine I'm seventy eight thousand on my gross but I'm over on my drive axle I'm thirty six I'm thirty let's say I'm thirty five thousand two hundred and fifty what are you gonna ask him Raquel. Did you try to move your drive axle? You said he's overweight on the drive axle? I see what you have in mind, but that's not quite it. Zara. You will ask, where is the overweight? Okay, we already know. He said his gross weight is fine. He says he's over on his drive axle. So, Tashi, what are you going to ask him? not what does he need to do you're thinking about what he needs to do I'm I'm what I'm trying to get you to do is think about how you're going to ask him these questions what's the first thing you need to ask him if he says he's over on his drives boom that's it that's it That's all you need to ask him. Have you tried sliding your tandems? Don't get into whether they need to be slid backwards, whether they need to be slid forward, because you will get confused. That's the driver's job to know which way they need to go to distribute the weight. All you need to do is ask him, did you try to slide it? Because maybe he didn't think about it. Maybe he didn't even think to slide his tandems. Maybe he's so upset and pissed off at the moment that he's not thinking, oh, it's only a few thousand pounds. Maybe if I slide it, then I can. It's not even a few thousand pounds. Remember, we're thirty five. The limit is what? The limit is thirty four. So if he slides, then maybe he can shift the weight. So let's get him to think about it. Are you trying to do is trigger his thought process. That's all you're trying to do. When you start talking about, did you slide him forward? Did you slide him backward? You're going to confuse yourself because. Even seasoned drivers like myself, we sometimes forget what we're doing and which way to go because we have like a million things running through our minds sometimes. So in order to keep the process from getting too complicated for you, just ask trigger questions. Did you try sliding them? Where are you overweight at? If he tells you he's overweight here, ain't much can be done. You're overweight, you're over your gross. And that's the number you really don't want to see. Because first of all, you're too heavy. And second of all, you're heavy somewhere. So that means the load has to be reworked. There's not any shifting around if you're too heavy. And remember, this happens a lot on weekends. It happens a lot with new people, new hires that are warehouse workers. You will experience that quite a bit. okay guys um any questions any statements anything that you can think of maverick um I don't have any questions right now okay you good yeah yes I feel caught up All right, Maverick is, you guys are, just so our Facebook family knows, Maverick's one of our work from home agents. So he's actually at home trying to absorb all this. He can see me just as well as they can. So he's not missing too much. He just can't see in depth the writing that we have on the board. So Maverick is an example of one of our work from home agents. while you guys are here in the office uh getting your learning and you're gonna be surprised guys and how many new drivers uh don't understand things like this because they've never really had to face it so It's a on the job learning thing for you as well as it's on the job learning thing for him. So as a new driver, so we want to try to help them solve their problems as best we can with the limit to knowledge that we'll have now. We talked about the reasons that there's regulations on or weight limits on the industry, on the trucking industry as a whole. What reasons did we talk about? What are some of the reasons that there's weight constraints or weight limits on commercial vehicles? Christine. Remember, we talked about the bridges. And some of you guys remember we talked about sometimes you'll see a bridge that has thirty T on it and you never thought about what that meant before. You know, so if you're traveling down the road, this is a heavy piece of equipment and you're going over bridges and different things like that. You have to be weight conscious. The government, so that's why they have set different regulations as far as how heavy the truck can be. And it's a heavy regulated industry. From the commodity to the amount of hours a driver can drive. What's the maximum amount of hours a driver can drive before he has to take a thirty minute break? Erwin? Eight hours. Okay. Okay. What if he drives four hours? Does he have to take a thirty minute break? He can if he wants to. Does he have to? He's only drove four hours. Not mandatory. OK, very good. You can only drive eight hours before you have to take a mandatory thirty minute break. Then how many hours do you have left to drive? Zyra? Four. Are you sure? Just a moment. Oh, three. Okay. All right. Three. Because you only have... No. How many hours do you have in a day to drive? Eleven. Eleven. Before you have to take eight hours, you got to take a mandatory thirty. Eleven hours, you have to take a ten-hour break, okay? What's the maximum amount of hours I can work in a day, in a shift, in a drive shift? It's working hours. Working hours. So if I'm washing my truck, is that work-related? Yes. Yes. If I'm checking my oil, is that work-related? Yes. Yes. Okay. All right. All right. Okay. Yes. If I'm at the receiver, or shipper getting loaded, is that work related? Yes. If I'm at the shipper getting unloaded, is that work related? Yes. Okay. Okay. All right. Very good. You guys got that so far. Can you think of any other questions or anything we missed? Maverick, do you have anything? None so far. Okay. Okay. What is... When you look on the dispatch or you ask... the broker or the direct shipper, what's the commodity? What are you asking them? When you see on the dispatch and it says commodity, what is that? What does that mean? The materials or the things what's inside of the trailer. Okay. It's actually what you're picking up, what you're transporting. So it's your cargo. Goods. What if the driver gets there and his bill of lading says he's picking up fruit? But then when he gets there, he's actually picking up meat. But his bill of lading says he's got fruit. Is that an issue or is that something we can just roll with and be like, oh, it's okay. You know, product is product. is that okay or is that something that needs to be corrected you have to what you have to ask to redo the bill of leading okay it has to be corrected all right first about the first thing the driver should do is he should uh call you and let you know hey there's a discrepancy on what I'm I'm carrying versus what you know the bill of lading says that's the first thing they should let you know uh any and everything that's going on that's uh wrong with that load they should let you know and nine times out of ten oh they will let you know if it's overweight the driver is going to let you know if the commodity is different than uh what's on the bill of lading or they will let you know what is a bol what is it though I mean what is it uh should describe the load itself what the commodity is um some other bits of information I'm not sure all the information should be on it okay is it important uh yeah okay so what is what should be on the bill of lading Raquel, what are some of the things that should be on the bill of lading? What is the commodity? When and where do you have to pick them? And then where and where will you deliver them? And the weights? What else? Okay. Okay. so the bill of lading is very very important guys it should tell you the weight the cargo the date should be on the bill of lading the shipper's information the receiver's information and the quantity of that cargo that's important That's very important that it has that some form of quantity. If you get stopped by a DOT officer, DOT stands for what? Department of Transportation. Transportation. Exactly. If you get stopped by a DOT officer, that cargo that's inside that trailer must be consistent with what's on that bill of lading or you have an issue. You have an issue. You don't want to give them any reason to question the legitimacy of what you're doing as a driver. And if you know what you're doing as a driver, you don't want to give them the opportunity to question anything because if they find out that you don't even know what you're carrying, then it's going to lead to other things. They're going to start questioning other things. Go ahead, JR. Basically, it's like a receipt or the contents of the trailer. Right. Now, what if, and this has happened to me quite a few times, sometimes a company will have multiple locations. For instance, BPO Solutions. We have a location in Miami. We have a location in the Philippines. We used to, well, in parts of the Philippines, we used to have one in Cebu. He's got other vendor accounts. We even got one in Mexico. Okay. So we've got several different facilities. I'm supposed to be picking up a load from the facility in Miami. But what's on the bill of lading is a facility in Texas as the pickup location. Is that OK? Is that something we can just let slide or do we just need to. OK, why not? Well, it looks like it's fudged. It looks like something's not above board. Like you're trying to cover something up right off the bat. so and then of course you're not able to track the load properly if it's labeled as coming from the wrong uh uh destination well see tracking has a lot of times to do with itself where it's physically at so that might not be an issue as far as tracking because that's how it goes You track the truck or you track with an app on the driver's phone. So as long as that's accurate, you can pretty much track the truck, track the cargo and things like that and the driver. What comes into issue is if you get stopped by a DOT officer or if you have to go through a way station and you have what's called a level one, level two or level three inspection. If you were supposed to be picking up a load in Miami and And that's where you said you were, and that's where your EOD said you were. Because they can track your movement. They can tell how you moved from A to B with that electronic logging device. So everything says Miami. Your paperwork says Texas. That's a big conflict. Texas is on one side of the country. Miami is way at the bottom on the other side. Right. They're automatically that's a red flag to the officer. And he's either going to think something's wrong or most of the time, if they're experienced, they're going to know something's probably they're not going to assume off the bat you the driver did something wrong. They're going to assume maybe there's something wrong with the BOL. But still, that was an issue you should have addressed at the shipper. see so it can cause an issue you might have to go through a whole lot of red tape to prove I was not in texas I actually got this load from miami so those are things that as a driver you know you have to be conscious of you have to read your your bill of ladies you have to read your dispatch instructions uh and can it be question sure Sen, can they opt-in in using the type of bills of lading? Because we do have to, right? If I got the materials correctly, we have the negotiable and non-negotiable, wherein they can opt-in with using a third party if the proximity is that far. I mean, could that be an option to the drivers? I'm trying to make sure I understand the question. You're talking about the bill of lading? Yes. And what would actually be his other option? Bill of ladings, they have two types, right? Negotiable and non-negotiable. so the negotiable one they can transfer to another party allowing a transfer of ownership of goods and the non-negotiable is cannot transfer typically used for internal shipment can they often or this is automatically on their uh bol are you reading something directly off the bill of lading yes when you say that no that's that uh the bill of lading is just like, it's the written, it's like the dispatch instructions in writing to a certain degree. Everything that's in there should be consistent with what was given in the dispatch instructions, although it's not. So once you get the bill of lading, there's nothing to negotiate at that point. The shipper has already set the goods allocated for that particular truck, everything that's supposed to go on that particular truck should be on the bill of lading. Now, the only thing really in negotiating with bills of lading is it comes in with factoring. That's the only time you really can negotiate on a bill of lading. And that's just when factoring comes into play. But a bill of lading, all that is is the document that outlines what's in the truck. I see. So when they get there, usually the shipper, when they arrive at the shipper, a lot of them will already have the product for that particular truck sit to the side or they'll have to go to specific areas to get the cargo that they're going to load on that truck. And so whatever's in that bill of lading, usually it's going to a specific place for a specific reason. okay gotcha thank you oh you're very welcome thank you for the question thank you for the question so remember guys those are the trigger questions to ask a driver if he calls in and remember you can try to sense the level of frustration in his voice if he's upset about something don't make it worse by making him seem like he's dumb or did he overlook something because that will get you uh That will get you. Don't do it. So if he's overweight, he says, hey, I'm overweight. He's real short. Would you just ask him where? If he tells you, I'm overweight on my drives, just ask him, did you try to slide your tandems? Don't get into specifics. If he says he's overweight and you're gross on his gross, try to figure out. You may not be looking at the dispatch at the time it calls. Try to figure out what his cargo is. know where he got loaded is there anyone still at the shipper uh and then from that point on we don't want the driver calling the shipper and things like that because he's already upset he's already po'd so that's where we come in we need to call the shipper we need to be the ones to talk to him in a calm reasonable voice and let them know hey you know we got a driver he's an hour away um you know He's overweight on his gross, you know, and then go from there. So we got to bring the load back to get reworked. So that whoever you talk to at the warehouse now, keep keep in mind who you need to be speaking to about specific things. So if you're talking to a warehouse supervisor or someone that loads the trucks, because a lot of times they'll transfer you to the person that actually loaded the truck. You don't need to be discussing with that person, OK, I need to get my driver more money because he's got to come back. That's out of his pay bracket. So the first thing you want to do is resolve that issue, get the driver going back. Then we'll figure out the appropriate person to talk to. You need to talk to the original person you got the load from and say, hey, I had a driver who's an hour away. In an hour, he got seventy-five miles up the road. you know so that's seventy five miles back that way seventy five miles back you see what I'm saying seventy five miles to get back to the shipper seventy five miles to get back to the point where he was when he found out he was overweight so that's how many miles seventy five plus seventy five is what that's a hundred and fifty miles to a driver that's a big deal That's a big deal. When you got to go one hundred and fifty miles out of your way for nothing. That's a big deal. That's fuel. That's time. You can't never get the time back. So we need to understand all that when he's frustrated. Do our best to calm him down. Don't be sarcastic. Don't be, you know. And if we find out he can adjust it. And he says when you told him to slide the tandems and it worked, say, OK, I'm glad you was able to figure it out, you know. I'm glad it worked out for you. Don't say, well, dummy, you should have thought of that in the first place. Or you can say that when you get off the phone, if you so choose, to yourself. But while you're talking to the driver, you want to be like, hey, You know, I'm glad it worked out for you. Thank God it worked out for you. And that lets them give them a feeling of reassurance that we're there for them. And ultimately, that's what we're there to do, guys. We're there to earn their trust, earn their business. Remember, we got to be on the driver's side more than we got to be on anybody else's side if they're in the right. We got to be on their side first because our relationship is with them. and it's hard. You'll find out as you keep going on through this thing. It's very complicated, and it's hard to get good drivers sometimes, good consistent drivers, guys. Okay, let's go over some other things, and we're going to wrap this session up because we have lunch soon, don't we, or do we? Are we past lunch? Why didn't you guys say something? because we're in the middle of this and it's okay. I got you. I tell you what, let's get ready to go to lunch. And then we'll pick back up on this when we get back. When we get back, we're gonna talk about invoicing and factoring. That's what we're gonna discuss when we get back. So you guys get ready to do your time tracks for lunch.