Two Years Later, How Are Companies Coping with DIM Weight Changes?

It has been just over two years since FedEx and UPS adopted new rules for dimensional (DIM) weight pricing. The rule change made more items subject to DIM weight pricing (as opposed to actual weight).

This year, FedEx announced that, starting in 2017, their dimensional weight rules will be changing again. Effective January 1, FedEx will change its dimensional weight divisor to 139 for U.S. Ground and Express shipments from its current value of 166. This will result in higher DIM weight measurements, and so possibly higher shipping costs on many packages. (No changes have been announced for UPS or other carriers, yet.)

When such changes occur, it is good to get some perspective. This article posted by Materialogic earlier this year not only gives good background about the previous round of DIM weight changes, it gives several good strategies for combating cost increases due to DIM weight changes.

For example, they recommend:

• Optimizing the way items are boxed for shipping
• Experimenting with new package designs
• Changing shipping locations, and possibly using a single “hub” location
• Working with a 3PL software solutions partner to analyze patterns and search for improvements

For details on these steps, we recommend reading the full article. We also suggest that shopping carriers for the best deal is a good idea too—if your shipping and/or warehouse management system affords that opportunity. These all appear to be strategies companies are using to make sure that changes in DIM weight rules have a minimal impact on their bottom line.