Is a Truck Scale Right for you?
Whether it’s verifying incoming supplies, recording inventory, checking for compliance, or determining the price of goods, truck scales play an important role in an efficient facility’s supply chain. Before selecting the correct truck scale for your facility, determine what role it will play in your supply chain.
Point of Sale
For industries distributing bulk goods based on weight, truck scales make an extremely efficient point of sale. By comparing the weight of a truck entering a facility to the weight as it leaves, you can quickly determine the amount of product loaded and charge the customer accordingly. A scale used in this capacity is functioning as a cash register.
Input Verification
Whether it’s human error or maliciousness, under-fulfilled orders are a common problem for many industries. For this reason, many of our partners utilize their scales to monitor supplies as they enter their facility. Truck Scales used in this way both guard against overcharges and ensure your operation is properly supplied at all times.
Output Verification
As much as we hate to admit it, an order under fulfillment can go both ways. Shipping an under-filled order can not only hurt your reputation but between refunds and extra deliveries, it can be a costly mistake. To avoid this mistake, many of our partners use truck scales to verifying outbound order before they leave the property.
Vehicle Loading and Filling
Many facilities in the agriculture and aggregate industries achieve fast and precise order fulfillment by loading trucks directly on their scale. This is achieved by utilizing an overhead hopper system or using a loader. Since high-impacts can damage load cells, we recommend using truck scales for low-impact filling applications only.
Efficiency through Data Collection
You can never underestimate the power accurate data can have on your facility. Between innovative software like Databridge and state-of-of the art equipment like the Powercell PDX, you can completely rely on our truck scale systems to provide an accurate eagles eye view of your facility’s inputs, outputs, and inventory. Once this data is on hand it can be used to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your operation.
Vehicle Safety and Compliance
Finally, by far one of the most important contributions a truck scale can make is an increase in safety. Federal law and many road systems impose strict vehicle weight requirements and heavy fines for good reasons. Overloaded vehicles are not only harder to control but they can cause damage to road systems potentially putting the driver and other motorists at risk. Verifying the weight of a truck before it leaves a facility is the best way to maintain safe and legal vehicle weights.
Selecting the Correct Truck Scale
Since most truck scales quickly become an important part of a facility’s daily operations and have a realities long life span, selecting the correct truck scale can be an importation decision leading decades of benefits (or burdens) for an owner. The configuration of a truck scale makes a huge impact on factors such as uptime, accuracy, and processing speed.
3 Types of Truck Scale Configurations:
Single-axle scales are typically a single scale module, or platform, large enough to accommodate a single set of truck axles. The main reason facilities choose this configuration is cost. These smaller scales cost considerably less than one that runs an entire truck length. By separately weighing each set of axles, single-axle scales provide a truck’s estimated total weight of a truck. However, this method is not accurate enough to be used in legal-for-trade applications (this method can be off anywhere from 450kg to over1000 lbs.). These scales are primarily used to check for compliance with maximum roadway limits.
Full truck scalesare composed of multiple weighing modules, or deck sections, that connect in a length long enough to accommodate an entire truck. These are the most common truck scale because legal-for-trade requirements often specify that the entire truck must be weighed at once.
Multi-axle truck scales are similar to full truck scales but with one key difference. Instead of interconnected modules and shared load cells, each module, or set of modules, has its own load cells. This allows different sections to operate as independent scales. The scale can provide the weight of the entire truck or allow the user to see the weight of each axle or group of axles. Because they additional require load cells, these scales are more expensive than a full truck scale
Still trying to pick the best truck scale for your facility?
Selecting the truck scale configuration is only the first step. There are numerous other factors to consider such as construction, loadcell types, deck material, and maintenance plans. Luckily, our friends at Mettler Toledo have created an in-depth guide designed to give an unbiased look into all aspects of truck scale selection. When you’re ready to make a decision or just want more info feel free to request a consultation from our team. We are always excited to share our passion for truck scales.
