01Why freight needs its own measuring points
Parcel dimensioners assume a conveyor and a carton. Freight breaks both assumptions — it arrives on a forklift, it may be taller than the operator, and its value is high enough that a billing error on one shipment costs more than a day of parcel corrections. Freight carriers know this, and LTL re-weigh and re-measure programmes are built on it. A freight dimensioner is the shipper's answer: measure the load yourself, at your dock, in the form the carrier will use.
The record matters beyond billing defence. Freight quotations, load plans and warehouse storage charges all run on volume, and all of them are estimates until a dimensioner replaces the tape measure.
02The freight range
Two measuring points cover most freight operations, with the parcel range below them for mixed sites.
Freight dimensioning in the Goodscan range
| Measuring point | Equipment | What it captures |
|---|---|---|
| Pallet dock | GS300Max / GS300Pro / GS300Min pallet dimensioners | Bounding-box dimensions and gross weight of a loaded pallet in one stop |
| Vehicle | GS400 truck dimensioning system | Load volume and occupancy of a loaded truck or container |
| Mixed freight bench | Static DWS (GS210Y / GS210B Plus) | Cartons and small freight that still move by hand |
03Irregular freight is the normal case
Crates lean, drums cluster, long loads overhang the pallet. A vision-based freight dimensioner measures the load as it actually sits — the smallest bounding box around the real shape — which is precisely the volume the carrier's own equipment will find. Tape-measure workflows systematically under-record this freight, because nobody measures the lean, and the difference arrives later as a re-class invoice.
For freight that cannot sit on a pallet base at all, the GS400 takes the measurement to the vehicle: it reconstructs the loaded space of a truck so planners and customers can see fill rate and remaining volume. That page — truck dimensioning — covers how load-volume records are used in linehaul planning.