Oh yes, the “guaranteed” delivery service. You pay an accessorial charge unless they still fail (which they do frequently) in which you just pay the normal rate... it’s absurd. However really all that does is make sure that your freight gets priority status when loading onto linehauls between terminals. They pick winners and losers and if you ship big shipments (10-20klbs+) yours will be the last to go on the trailer, because the smaller the shipment the more they make. One pallet orders are the first to get loaded.
LTL providers are very open about the fact that transit times on standard service is not guaranteed. It’s an estimate and maybe they hit transit times on 85-95% of shipments across their coverage map. That’s for direct service where they service it all the way to the destination. Indirect service with a partner carrier, such as SAIA formerly handing off northeast shipments to New England Motor Freight (RIP), all bets are off. When shit gets lost on interlined shipments it’s always fun. And don’t even get me started on Canada freight. It’s an absolute shit show.
Used to manage a combined 120m spend in LTL freight for 4 different shippers around the US/Can. AMA if you want me to get my blood boiling
Giving me PTSD of all the times I use to have to setup a recovery from a LTL Facility. "Well it said 3 day transit!"
I was just given access to our delivery time database and informed that since a management shake up three months ago we had not entered times for deliveries. Now we get to go through ( mostly digital ) paperwork and correct this, lol.
I've worked for the same logistics company for 14 years now. Going through another management change, CMA CGM bought majority of our shares. Interested to see how many of the previous management they replace with their own. I hate this company and wouldn't recommend it to anybody. CEVA
I cold started my company’s first logistics inside sales division and currently only recruit, hire, and train new sales reps in our two offices. What’s up?
I think there’s a few people on here who have been in freight/brokerage sales at one point in time. I spent 4 years in brokerage sales/ops at Coyote.
Question for fellow logistics folks: Cliffs: My logistics / warehousing business is considering registering as a vendor with the General Services Administration, essentially pre-qualifying ourselves for Federal contracts. Question #1: Anyone have experience doing this? Worked out well? Have been perusing the government contracts log and it appears here is a quite a bit of dealflow going through his system and could be a lucrative opportunity. Question #2: Apparently the application is hundreds of pages long, approval times in the 4-8 months range. There are quite a few consultants out there pitching the ability to manage this process for $4K to $6K. Anyone ever used one? Thanks and appreciate whatever insight anyone has.
How is everyone? I left our freight brokerage division in January to work for our sister company that builds supply chain platforms. We built a reverse logistics WMS for a top retailer and a TMS for shippers to help expand their capacity and book freight with smaller trucking companies.
Starting to see some warehouse construction sites getting shut down. Scary times ahead. Seems most existing operations for “essential” retailers aren’t impacted as of yet
still doing fine in brokerage currently. mainly because all of my biggest customers are building materials companies and they’ve managed to fall under essential gonna get rough mid april imo
I transferred into a safety/quality role, and we're very behind in that area as we haven't had anybody paying attention to either in awhile. I also still have my hands on with UA's fixture account. Their wholesale accounts have been shut down, so there's nothing there; but their new store builds continue, so we have to supply them. The other retail accounts we provide are all shut down. One was hoping to get rolling again next week, but I highly doubt they're given the green light to open back up. The other part of our building is freight forwarding, so they've actually gotten more busy than they had been as of late. Nearly impossible for anybody in this building to work from home.
I'm still with the sweedes, but global HQ shut down all stores outside of China late last week. We shut our doors to the public weeks before that, and only fulfulling ecommerce orders ( and doing some crazy good numbers, too ). I moved onto supply quality coordinator, or I will when they fill my old position ( six months and counting ). Before closing, our shipments, not counting sea containers, had dried up anyway ( from 4 trucks a day from the DC and and ~1 a day for perishable to one a day and two per week ).
Do you like their WMS? Our customer remodels 800 stores a year and opened up 32 warehouses specifically for the remodeling process. Our WMS connects their fixture suppliers, fixture traffic managers, warehouse managers, and field project managers all in the same platform. They are finishing up their current remodels now and will delay the start of others for 3-4 months with the hopes of still completing all by the end of the year.
The government here pay most of the wages for people you send home during this. so we can maintain the workforce, who still gets paid they just cant work until they get called bag into work. The company has to send at least 50 home to use it. So my company sent 53 people home today. I’m not one of them. I do pricing on airfreight. we get way fewer mails from clients wanting a rate, but the once we get take 2-3 times as long. The market is so fucked so its really weird.
I work for a very large food manufacturer. We‘re in a warzone boys! I actually use battlefield analogies almost daily at this point (usually sports are my go to). I told someone today that I dropped my m16 in the mud when I was having laptop issues. It’s eerily quiet in the trenches waiting for the enemy to charge (waiting for orders to drop in). I’m putting a nice spin on the typical corporate speak that we’re accustomed to and it’s been a nice source of comic relief during these goofy ass camera-on conference calls.
My Customer just closed 7 plants in GA for 2 weeks. Another plant is closing for a day for "deep cleaning". Have a few other plants across the country that are still operating. Scary stuff.
As much of a shit show that you think the actual grocery stores are as a consumer (some worse than others as I’ve witnessed) the upstream process by and large is a complete cluster fuck.
A lot of the facilities I have heard of seeing cases do basically a 1 day closure and “deep cleaning” and then reopen ASAP. Infrared themometers at the door.
I think our WMS is out-dated, we still run unicode (gemba). I don't think the customer really has any clue about what they have in inventory. They have visuals of quantities, but they also ordered about 10x what they needed a few years ago so we have 2000 of some parts on hand that have been sitting for 5 years. They pay for each BIN they use up, so they are throwing money away.
We've had our two busiest weeks of 2020 the last two weeks. There were some rumors a little over a week ago that the Corp of Engineers was going to be shutting down the rivers...very thankful that hasn't happened yet.
god they closed some of the terminals in seattle at the port yesterday for cleaning fucking disaster today
Thanks! The Wife works in HR so she is allover it. She had a huge list of questions for me to go back to my Manager and HR with.
Things just ramped up here. Have been getting charters direct from China. I'm guessing a lot of it is stuff that has been sitting there since their lockdown.
From a global supply chain standpoint it’s going to be a shit show with Chinese freight on the water only to arrive and have nowhere to go.
I just got a headache thinking about all of the trailers loaded and ready to ship to my store that are sitting around waiting. Our fast frequency DC is still open for online orders, and trailers for retail stores are done by the once a year forecast. Oh yeah, and this is our peak season at IKEA ( May-Sept ). We already had a huge hiccup when we switched carriers from Landstar to Florida East Coast Railways at the end of 2019. It took 6 weeks to sort those loads out ( we had 9 trailers parked behind the store at one point with 6 bay doors full of recieved loads already and three full trailers arriving from the DC every day ).
I'm very curious what the start-up will look like once it's approved. Gap/Old Navy/DSW are our retailers. What kind of demand will they have once stores open back up? Will people be frugal with their money? Will there be a rush for new clothes/shoes? Will it be a slow drip?
If it’s around the time kids are going back to school, I’d think the demand would be relatively healthy.
Do not. Just Gap brands and DSW. I also wondered about BTS stuff since that's usually a semi-peak time, but with the uncertainty around everything. I'm slowly moving out of our VAS department so I'm not in touch with the customers to know what they're planning.