Riddle me this...

Yeah I have that seldom wrong thing too

I would love nothing more than to answer your question completely, but I cannot.

I can only tell you how it works from the view of a very hot air-freight load, one of the few times I will be involved in an order from the very beginning.

1. Customer calls, asks if we can take a load from, for example, LAX to JFK.
2. I ask when the load picks up, date and time (usually that night).
3. I call the planner for LA, ask if we have a team.
4. Assuming we do, I say yes we have a team.
5. Customer emails the load info to us.
6. The order is built with all info the customer sent.
7. Planner is given the order number and informed its adhoc load and needs to roll now.
8. Planner plans the load, team accepts preplan.
9. From this point, someone in JIT is monitoring this load. Once every hour or two, the progress of this truck is checked. It may be every 3 or 4 hours.
10. Load is picked up, loaded call sent by team.
11. Through the entire trip, the load is monitored. Any issues come up, the team lets JIT know, and JIT makes sure that the team is tracking on time. Again, its air freight, little room for error.
12. From time to time the customer will call, usually 5-6 times a day, looking for a progress report on the load.
13. Team arrives, sends macro 5.
14. Tracking ends at this point, usually.
15. Macro 6 is sent and team awaits another load with lots of miles and very little time.

Thats it, in a nutshell. Now with your "normal" freight customers, I honestly dont really know how the order process starts.

And you may have a customer that is always drop and hook, no matter what, but then one day you get one and it says "live load" or "live unload". You think to yourself, well the CSR screwed up, because, lets face it, mistakes happen. But dont bank on that. There are times when a customer will want to live load or unload a trailer. Maybe they do not have any empties to load. Maybe they need to use the product you are bringing in as soon as you bring it in.

As for CSR accountability, trust me when I say that CSR's are held accountable. But while you are held accountable by your DM, I would bet you have never gotten a phone call from a VP dressing you down. Well, that happens. And CSR's get written up, as do DM's. Why do drivers not find out about it? Honestly, you dont need to. Its a HR thing at that point, not a "driver vs everyone else".

I find this forum entertaining, because reading through here, one would think that the "inside" people at Swift, when not on Facebook or napping, are having meetings and plotting about how to make a drivers life miserable.

When you have some downtime at your home terminal, why not ask your DM if you can shadow them for a day. You would be surprised.

 

I dont know what place in Cicero you are talking about... But yes, mistakes happen. Shippers do not always communicate changes in policy, they just give a window of when we need to be there.

When a driver calls and says "another driver took my load", we cannot just take that as gospel. Of course we need to know which driver took it! A mistake was made, we need to find out what happened, who made the mistake, and correct it! Would you believe your DM if he said "oh, no load today"? Thats why if you get somewhere and the shipper says "your load was cancelled", you are asked for a name and phone number. We need to know why they had us send a truck out there when there wasnt a load. ITs not that your DM doesnt believe you, its called accountability. Everyone is held accountable. I am given the freedom to do my job with very little supervision. If I do my job well, then great! But if I screw up, I am held accountable for that. And we hold our customers accountable too. Think they wont pay for that truck coming out?

There is a record of empty trailers. You give me a trailer number, I can tell you where it is. Some trailers I can even track their exact location at any given moment. But if a driver moves a trailer without telling anyone (that never happens, right?), then suddenly the trailer is not where we know it should be! And then sometimes, customers will stockpile trailers, especially around their busy times, and not release them to drivers. There are places where empty trailers are hard to find. Thats trucking. It was like that when I started driving in 1993, and almost 20 years later, its the same way.