Hurry up and Wait! Could it by your own fault?

The Trucking industry is holding the construction industry hostage; is it their fault or ours?  

I have seen an evolution of service in the freight industry over the past two decades.  One thing that remains the same is that service is unreliable at best.  As trucking companies compete for your freight, they try to speed up delivery times and keep their prices competitive.  As an outsider looking in, the process of shipping LTL freight seems very inefficient.  They can move a pallet across three states and have it change trucks three times and sit at each terminal for hours in a half loaded trailer.  I know they have a very complicated logistics model to work with and that they have to maximize the load in each truck, but it just seems off.  Logistics is not the only issue that plagues the trucking industry, fuel prices can destroy a company instantly.

I sympathize with the trucking industries reliance on fuel prices and how their bottom line can change with one embargo or terrorist event.  A hurricane or an oil spill can take a freight company down quickly when fuel doubles overnight.  Resinous flooring materials can be similarly impacted by oil prices; most resinous products are manufactured from oil based resins that are sourced from all over the world.  That is one reason why the urethane cement market has grown so rapidly in the past decade.  With a volatile fossil fuel market, it is nice to have a product line that is not directly dependent on the price of oil.  Freight, as with many industries, relies heavily on the market price of oil, and with the pressure of turning a profit they have to manage the movement of their trucks in the most efficient way possible.

The real question is, “does our expectation of freight drive the problems we are dealing with”?

We live in a society that wants to rush all of the time; we hurry up and finish projects that sit unused for months, or we set unrealistic deadlines and hold everyone else accountable to meet them.  Trucking is the tip of the iceberg, but the expectation of unrealistic service has led the industry to make promises that it cannot keep.  Try specifying a lift gate for a delivery; you might have a 50% chance of having one.  My point is simple; when a customer asks for the impossible, have the courage to tell them that you cannot do it and then give them a reasonable solution that is obtainable.  If the freight companies added a day to there delivery maps and forced everyone to plan ahead, we would all receive fright when we expected it and everyone would be better off.  We might stop living life one emergency to another.

Moral:  Companies should learn to manage expectations on both the ends (the company and the customer) and not to promise the impossible.  It is possible that we (I include myself) could live a little more stress free if we managed expectations with our customers better.