Wheel Nut:
Who is your business targeted at? for instance a customer in the UK or in America? Asia? Europe?Fedex are great for sending stuff to Baltimore, maybe not so hot if its going to Berwick on Tweed.
Hi Malc,
My customer has used FedEx for a few years now.
The problems arose because the customer was continually using tradenames instead of PSNs, so FedEx got a bit miffed with them.
Once I’d been to the customer and delivered a DG ‘awareness’ course for the shipping dept, the next step was to have a meeting with a FedEx DGSA. My solution to the problem was to ask the customer for an up to date MSDS for everything they wanted to ship, then I devised a ‘translation’ as well as the relevant LQ sizes for each product and put the lot on a spreadsheet for the boss. It worked that well that I hardly ever hear from them these days. 
In my experience, it’s all about setting out the paperwork in a way that’s acceptable to the carrier once regard is had to how they want it doing. All of my customer’s deliveries are UK only, and they report that they’ve not experienced any significant problems with FedEx’s service levels.
It might have something to do with volumes in the OP’s case though, cos my customer usually needs about half of the available deck space in an LWB sprinter van every day.
I have another customer who swears by DHL, but it was exactly the same story with the same teething problems at first.
Once that customer understood that the 9 perfume fragrances (that they had 9 different names for) all had the same UN number, things got easier for them quite quickly after the initial shock.