Easy Ways to Understand Freight Class!

What is Freight Class?

In order to understand the freight class calculation, at first, we will describe little about freight or freight transport. It is the process that involves the transportation of physical commodities across different areas. In economics and commerce, terms like cargo, shipment, and freight transport are analogous and interchangeable. They all refer to the movement of goods carried by large vehicles. This transportation can be through various channels, i.e., land, sea, or by air. Moreover, all the global transportation of goods needs to be in compliance with the standards set by the nation of sender and receiver. This bilateral exchange of commodities has become an essential move to keep floating the world’s economy.

Why Is It Important?

This classification system of freight class helps to determine the pricing and formulating the cost to transport the goods across different places. There are certain established ways to determine freight class for your shipments like, by measuring your freight density or through National Motor Freight Classification (NMFC). This classification system of freight class helps in mainstreaming the same undisputed price for transportation. Furthermore, this can be varied for two cases. Firstly, if the specific amount of the commodities need to be moved or the entire stock of goods needs to be shifted.
The main motive behind developing a systematic classification is to deliver a framework where the comparisons of freight identifications and their cost can easily be estimated. A nonprofit membership organization of motor carriers The National Motor Freight Traffic Association (NMFTA) devised a system in which they used to assign a freight class code by keeping the account of some certain qualifications. It provided a standard template for interstate, intrastate, and the global shipment of ‘less than truckload’ commodities.

How does it Work?

It is never an easy task to customize and classify the freight to eliminate redundancy and reduce the cost of the process. The factors affecting the freight class can be listed in the way,
Density - The Ease of Handling - Liability - Stowability
The stowability discusses the nature of good, whether it is flammable or fragile enough that it could not be carried along with the other commodities. It extends the service to the careful handling of the goods which would be assigned codes of different series. Liability refers to the possibility of any accidental damage or risk of theft while transporting the objects. The other parameter is the density, which shows the amount of objects needed to be transported, this can be partial, quarter, full, or some proportion of the total. Formally saying, the density comes into work when the commodities have a different range of sizes and a specific amount of objects differ from shipment to shipment.

How to Calculate Freight Density

When it comes to the calculation of freight density, you will need to find the length, width, and height of the freight in a unit of an inch, which should include the dimensions of freight packaging as well. Multiply all three values and you will have the size of the freight in cubic inches. As there are 1728 cubic inches that exist in one cubic feet, so to convert it into cubic feet, you need to divide the product value by 1728. Lastly, divide the weight of your freight with the resultant value of cubic feet you will end up calculating the freight density.
The freight class will be given on the base of the figure obtained after calculating freight density. For example, the freight density ranging over 30 will be assigned a freight class of 60. The freight density of less than 1 will be assigned with a freight class of 400. The more spacy or density your freight will have, the more charges you will have to pay for it.
And after that you can also use online tools to easily solve your calculation .such as you can use freight class calculators online .