Had a repair depot close down unexpectedly with hundreds of our customer's products there and about a hundred more a day coming in. Spent last week in Austin trying to get all of our shit out the door by Friday so that was fun.
We primarily haul corrugated to humongous meat processing plants (Smithfield, Tyson, Keystone, ect.,) Everybody needs trailers and nobody quite knows whether they'll need deliveries on Friday or Monday. Amazon is trying to push our shit in too. It's a fucking lovely time of year in this business.
Any of you guys have a one-time repair cost chart or have a limit on how much you'll spend on maintaining a vehicle?
Company that has hauled 9 banana loads/week for the last 3 months decided to run their reefer on 39 last night and I now own a load of bananas! Anyone like green bananas?! I have 960 cases
Sup guys So I've been looking to get into the SCM/Logistics field. I have an economics degree and worked in insurance for the last year and just started searching for a gig in this field. Pretty open to location and moving but is there anything I should be aware of? Any certifications I should get to boost my marketability? Are there certain states that are better than others in this field? A quick search shows that Arizona seems to be pretty strong in this field with job openings.
Columbus is a pretty big logistics hub in the country as it's within 500 miles of 50% of the country's population. Six Sigma stuff helps, but you could probably get an employer to pay for that as well.
Never thought of Columbus being a hub for logistics but makes sense. Thanks for the help, have done some reading about the Six Sigma stuff but not sure it's worth it to shell out the money myself initially.
There is a massive distribution "neighborhood" in Groveport and Obetz just south of Columbus...around Rickenbacker airport which is a foreign trade zone. Amazon actually just put two huge warehouses in the Columbus area...Target has one. The logistics company Exel which is one of the biggest supply chain companies in the nation is based in Columbus...and XPO Logistics has a monster office here as well. Plus, companies like L Brands (Victoria's Secret, Bath & Body Works, Hollister), Abercrombie and Fitch, Rogue, Cardinal Health and others are based in Columbus. OSU has a top 5 logistics program in the nation as well. I used to work for Exel...good company.
I was hired with TQL and I absolutely hated it. I was put on the largest account and just worked booking trucks and dealing with issues. I was in my training program and still working about 10-12 hours a day and I burned out quickly. After about 3 months I was burned out and ready to get on my own account. I felt like quitting numerous times, but I stuck with it. I didn't make it on my own and I was thrilled when they let me go. Running my own account felt like a vacation compared to what I had been trained on. Next time I will only work for an asset based company, 3pl was not fun at all. We had a driver die on us and one was arrested for drugs, he was only late for delivery about 5 days. EDIT: Also had a driver's truck catch on fire. His truck wasn't running properly, so he stopped on the highway and another driver came to pick him up and the load for delivery. H e flew back to the city and went to the truck and there was just a black spot. Went into town and the police said that the truck completely burned, the driver thought it may have been arson. I felt sorry for him.
Nashville is big too. Off the top of my head we have 2 amazon warehouses, new under armour warehouse, ceva, asurion etc
Getting out of logistics. Bittersweet, but mostly sweet because I'm tired of dealing with trash people and companies on a daily basis.
I've realized that the costs outweigh the benefits. I'm just not with the hectic pointless bullshit. If I don't get canned I'd be surprised. I constantly let it be known I'm just not into it and I've been called out on it and simply replied " I don't care" and just put my headphones back in. It's a great company and my coworkers are great and really good at what they do but I'm just not feeling it.
It's a hectic industry for sure. Usually can tell pretty quickly if someone can handle it or not. Had one co-worker that I expected him to throw his monitor through a window and walk out at any minute.
If you really want to make friends at work start value stream mapping their operations and let management know about all the non value added activities that are taking place. I like to add the occasional, "you know, seven of the eight forms of waste are taking place right in front of us. Did you lay off all your engineers?"
Being in an analytics or management role in logistics isn't that bad. However coordinator positions are miserable as fuck. You are a pencil and paper bitch in an extremely grimey business.
Yeah I put effort into it, but it just wasn't for me, calling the same companies over and over again gets old quickly.
Yeah I started to hate it, but I got a lot of voicemails so that boosted my times other than just a hang-up. I would always call businesses that we hadn't called for a few months, just so it wasn't so annoying for them.
Half the time brokers call us it sounds like they are high....usually just so new they don't really know what they are doing.
Company decided to pay to have an instructor come and give a 2 day class for test 1 of the CPSM certification and also buy us a membership in a couple trade organizations so that's pretty awesome.
Just got notified that 2 different jewelry packages were stolen from a UPS truck. $16k in merchandise gone and we'll get a whopping $100 for each package. And I mean stolen as the police showed up at the two client's stores and told them they were stolen. That's the first we've heard about it.
That's not our smallest loss through them.... had one "lost" package for $28k. Most of our shipments through them don't have that kind of value, just sucks when those get hit. Probably going to move our jewelry to UPS Capital which has insurance for full value included.
I'm honestly not sure how you guys keep doing this. I did it from 17 to 24 and was ready to murder everyone. Started driving, then local dispatch, then over the road dispatch, then brokerage, finally culminating in running a small DC in the Chicago suburbs. The shit I went through and dealt with blows my mind. A lot of it early on was when gas prices skyrocketed as well. Still have few friends in the industry and they all hate it. It burned me out so bad I took a wayyyy back seat and went to work for a big manufacturer and currently drive a forklift. Much less stressful. Granted, I never made it past the grunt pencil pushing stage so I'm not sure how the management part of logistics is. I just know from small to big companies I was in, the fuckery was the same.
I have clients thay ship 20k worth of product ups. If you're a high volume shipper the declared value isn't worth it usually
Metal a guy at an ltl conference that shipped pills. Hundreds of thousands in merchandise ear shipment
We spend about $4 million a year I think just on jewelry (mobility is probably closer to $60) and last year we had about $125k in jewelry losses. Definitely not worth it to declare value.
Sitting through training for the first exam on the CPSM certification. It's all finance and contracting and stuff like that so definitely a ton of shit I didn't know before.
Email to Supplier 1 month ago: Changing your Thursday 3/16 pickup to Wednesday 3/15. Email to Supplier 2 Weeks ago: Still Changing your Thursday 3/16 pickup to Wednesday 3/15. Email to Supplier 1 Week ago: Pickup on Wednesday 3/15. Email Yesterday at 9AM: Pickup on Wednesday 3/15. Email from Supplier at 5:50PM Yesterday: Why has the pickup changed? Why were we not notified? We cannot have freight ready for tomorrow morning. The world I live in everyday!
Oh of course. Document everything to save my ass. Helps explain the higher cost and why freight is late.
I mean we ship 20K phones that range from $100-$800 per phone a day out of here. Then jewelry, retail (laptops, game consoles, etc). Declared value is definitely not in our best interest. We may be moving to UPS capital for jewelry though. A small additional charge per shipment but each package would be insured up to $5k, each claim paid approved and paid within 5-10 business days, dedicated monitoring, etc. Just need to talk management into taking on what works out to about $30k a year in additional costs (that's after factoring in getting paid on these high end claims) but doesn't factor in labor savings. Right now they have 4 people spending about 5 hours a week on claims and other shipping issues. That time would be basically wiped out with UPS capital.
So if you could pick 6 cities to place fsl's to maximize FedEx ltl one day zones, where would you put them. Hub is in Detroit
Wait like International going out or coming in? I have no idea either way, I don't deal with international shipments really. Just curious.
No this is all domestic. We have customers all over the country and want to offer most of them 1 day shipping on freight, so we want as much coverage as possible without having to pay extra for express freight.
Wait I thought you said FedEx international though? Or did i read that abbreviation wrong. Actual freight shipments, not small package? I'd assume Memphis would need to be one, possibly Louisville ( i think I read like 90% of the country is within a 3 day ground footprint of Louisville?) Somewhere west coast.
mmm LTL... Dallas Memphis/Nashville/Louisville Baltimore no clue about West coast only deal with SE fortunately and not too much LTL so I'm no help Thanks
Nashville, louisville and Memphis seem like they'd cover a lot of the same one-day zones. I'm leaning towards Sacramento for west coast, but that doesn't reach Seattle or phoenix.