hey brokers, has elogs changed business/rates etc?

When people talk about a company being good at logistics it's MOSTLY about them being good at utilizing their transportation resources as much as possible. This is a perfect example of what you want to avoid running a supply chain. They could save a lot of money by just warehousing the product one extra day and booking appropriate transportation for whatever sized piece they are moving. I guess plumbing supplies is a high margin business.

 

Man, I guess. I tried to explain that to them once. "Our customers like being able to change orders up until it ships."

 

So... create a new status 'staging' where the order is scheduled for pickup and no longer subject to change. From the customers point of view the freight will arrive 12-24 hour slower and the freight charges will get tons cheaper.

I know you already told them all this and they won't listen. That's the sad thing. Sometimes I think that maybe the reason I'm good at this is that I'm personally offended by waste. I HATE having trucks do long deadheads to my freight (unless they are coming from the North East, FL, CO, or some other sizeable dead zone where this is inevitable). I hate seeing a customer waste money on silly freight setups. I actively try to help everyone (truck and customer) improve whatever I see that could be improved.

Honestly a good freight broker is like a freelance transportation manager. Imagine a truck backing into a dock. The shipper is the dock and the trucking company is the truck. I'm the guy standing on the outside guiding the truck in. I can see both entities from the outside and can see what obstacles both parties are putting up to doing efficient business. A big part of my job is negotiating with both sides to drop those obstacles so that things can get done with no friction.

 

Yeah, and I even proposed that pretty much verbatim. "That's just how we do it." Okay. I'll leave it be. They pay fast, and they've got freight. If they want to pay for a whole truck, that's on them.

 

Holidays plus Elogs. Lots of 1099 spot market companies have parked already and will be off till the end of Jan. Some of them still run on paper until Dot really starts enforcing.
Feb-Apr will be the usual slow cheap stuff, but May-Dec I think will be incredible.
I personally never had a week better than this one. If I did not have family, I wouldn't even go home till February

 

It’s hard to say at this point for sure. I believe this week it’s probably more due to the holidays. As mentioned, once we get into January and February (typically slow months for some segments) I think we’ll start to see if there is a true impact.

I’ve been trying to take in as many perspectives as possible on what the impact will be (if any). What I believe is it will certainly be commodity, customer, shipper/receiver, and mileage dependent. Those customers/shippers that can afford to be flexible with their products and supply chains may not see much difference. But those that have any kind of time requirement to get things shipped/received I think are going to have at some point some tough choices to make. Do they pay more for the truck that can meet their pickup/delivery requirements? Do they increase their inventories to help survive fluctuations in truck capacity? Do they hire more staff to increase shipping/receiving hours. Do they have anything to worry about at all?

I guess it will all depend on whatever price tag is associated with that customers comfortability. It’s all easy for us (brokers & carriers) to say shippers/receivers need to increase their hours/flexibility/ timeliness to load & unload trucks. However to me shippers/receivers/customers aren't magically going to hire more employees to do this unless it benefits them. Some may be perfectly fine paying more for a truck to meet their needs. And what about those of us whose customers don’t control either the shipping point or receiving point. Is their buying power going to be enough to help insert flexibility in the supply chain?

The challenge for brokers & especially carriers that live in the spot market, will be to recognize your worth. I believe the ELD will at least expose where HOS lines have been blurred in the past in order to get the job done. Do you have a truck/carrier that can meet the requirements of a certain load? If so charge accordingly, know how much revenue you need to cover the time under the load and the risks associated with it. Don’t sell yourself short.

 

Is this the beginning????

 

I understand that completely and have no problem with it. I haul a lot of loads that only end up being 4-6 pallets of freight. Or, if you tell me the weight is 40k and it turns out to be 44k, I'm ok with that as long as I can scale out legal.

The one I'm talking about are the ones that don't know if the product is horse s#+t or wild honey.

 

It's the end for me, as soon as I read 4 to 10 stops and driver assist...

 

Charge a daily rate on those 4 to 6 drop loads and they can be money makers. A lot of times brokers can't get anyone to give them an option and they might not take your rate right away but come around to it.