Spot market volumes bounce back to pre-Thanksgiving volume, and then some

Huh. Well isn't that nifty. What TMS do you guys use?

 

We use Mercury Gate International. I like the DAT/TMS data integration, but sometimes it throws loads on there that aren't really comparing apples to apples, especially when you start to move away from hub to hub shipping.

 

Gotcha. Yeah, we use McLeod. We have cross-posting capability, but I don't actually use it. It takes too long to pull down loads from the boards when we pull in the system. We also have McLeod's rating tool, but that is pretty wonky at the best of times. I can see how the data integration would get weird outside of hub to hub for you guys.

 

Good buddy of mine sells cars for a living, and has dyslexia, and purely hates charts and spreadsheets, and the like. I sent him a picture of our internal load board, which looks remarkably like a spreadsheet, with a column for the load status, "Available, Covered, RC-Sent, RC-Resent, Progress, Delivered," on that column.... etc.

The immediate text I got back was, "OH GOD I HATE THAT SO MUCH."

I didn't even bother showing him my locations tracking and telemarketing charts, and all the other little things I use in a given day.

 

There are a lot of guys like that that have no problem making millions. Book smarts, so to speak, aren’t everything.

 

Nice, I've heard of McLeod but never actually used it.

And yeah, I take all the "integrated pricing tools", including what we have with DAT, with a grain of salt. They have a hard time filtering out extra stops, or accounting for things like non standard appointments or transit times.

 

Yeah, one of the things I like about this forum is that it helps me learn more about the trucking industry from the point of view of the truck driver.

At least once a week a pissed off truck driver yells at one of our team members, often times for something that was completely outside of our control (I promise you, I want the lazy shipping department loader to get that product on your truck as quickly as possible). I sometimes have to remind our team that the majority of drivers aren't bad or angry people trying to rake us over the coals, they are just men and women like us trying to do their job well and put food on the table.

They all know what it feels like when they are getting ready to sign off for the day only to find out that something is wrong with a load they will have to work on for the next hour or two to resolve. I ask them to imagine what it would be like if instead they had to wait there all night and sleep on a cot in the office (which is how I imagine a sleeper cab to be) instead of going home to a comfy bed, and how upset they would be.

I think if everyone in this industry (shippers included) tried to have some empathy for the carriers/shippers/brokers they worked with, it would all sail a little more smoothly.

 

In MI and OH dry van freight has tanked drastically

 

On avg that's about what it shows in my area too. Sometimes as high as 2000+ with my 75mi search radius