Extra profit to be made from an axle weighbridge

If you open any of the trucking trade magazines, you will inevitably find an article, statistics or both about fuel economy. Vital as that is, there is more than one way to add to the bottom line.

We recently installed eight axle weighbridges for Hanson who, just like any other haulier, need to squeeze the maximum profit from their operation. All operators need to run legally though and one way to avoid overloading is to run vehicles at less than full capacity. This though is costly; you have carrying capacity which you're not using.

To avoid this, Hanson priced up axle weighing systems and found that by maximising their loads they would get their investment back in 2-3 months. Yes that's right 2-3 months. After that, they are making extra profit on every trip.

One of the Hanson axle weighbridges

The system is completely driver operated so no extra staff are needed. As a vehicle approaches the axle weighing platform, the driver enters in a vehicle ID and a trailer ID. The system also asks if there are any axles lifted, it's not unusual for a 6-axle outfit to run at 5-axles if not fully loaded, so that the system weighs the right number of axles.

Each weighing is stored in memory so that management can get a print showing who used it, when, were they overloaded, did they weigh again after correcting an overload and most importantly what the percentage utilization of the vehicle is.

And the result of all this is that Hanson now load their vehicles to maximum, squeeze every last ounce of payload out of them and will increase their profits.

Adding to the bottom line isn't just about fuel economy and using an axle weigher to improve efficiency is a good alternative.