DM Dispatches at the office

What are DM dispatches.
What co. Is this.

 

Standard with our dispatchers. They plan things such that the second you arrive at a place you can immediately leave and head to the next. Loading and unloading only takes the time it takes to sign the paperwork.

 

Soon you realize your appointment for delivery is late, stop wherever you are and call dispatch and make a new valid appointment that is LEGAL under your remaining hours. DO NOT MOVE until you have that appointment.

If your Elog tells you to halt and stay because you are now out of hours. Stop and stay, get some sleep. Call dispatch again for a new appointment time as soon you realize that you will be late to the original delivery appt.

It's a constant communication. Updating as you go.

For your part trip planning is necessary. The miles to do the load against your 8 day hourly recap versus the appt time. If you cannot make it, dispatch might already know this and have a team coming to get your load and deliver it. You usually will be told there is a team coming to get it off you. That was what we did quite a bit with FFE, racing 600-1000 miles empty to grab a late load off a single anywhere in the USA and canada.

Now with that out of the way consider the following.

The old days of being late to a appointment time made without your participation or knowledge until you got loaded and then told by dispatch you have to be in Timbuktu overnight by 4 am. It's not going to happen or continue in this industry no more. That is going to get stopped.

Shippers and recievers know that day is coming where they cannot enforce too short appointments made by dispatcher, sales, brokers or anyone else not physically driving that truck YOU are.

Eventually ROBOT trucks will get to wherever place WHEN they get there and not a minute before. There is at that time NO point in doing the old appointment model anymore.

Make changes in your communciation until you get updated appointments you can LEGALLY make. The old days of flying with three logs are over. The old days of being outlaw is over.

Basically that model of business is dead but like a hog, the industry does not realize it yet.

 

Oh ok , just generalizing Not speaking about ones company. Thought DM was a company.

 

That is about right.

We left FFE after a time for that same reason.

There is or was a great deal of lost miles unpaid in terms of time consumed chasing loads. If we were not engaged in that kind of wild goose chinese fire drill problem... saving dispatch's bacon... actual miles potential would have pushed our gross income beyond 120K for the year. But 65K was actually too low for the number of days served that year.

We did have periods of time in which we did actual freight twice a week between LA and Avenel NJ, incredibly profitable and such riches. If we did that for 306 days, it would potentially made over 150K for the year. But nope.

We recognized the losses over time and cut bait moved on. What we ended up doing with McKesson for that winter and fall was very good, but not enough to save the year.