Just in time phenomenon--what a joke

I had to take a load from Laredo up to Wildwood in Bloomington. I was running behind schedule, and just before I left Big Cabin, I called and said that if I went through the terminal in Joplinl, most likely they would find something wrong with the truck and put it in the shop, putting me further behind schedule. After I got my shop out, around midnight, I got into my truck and said "Okay. Let's do this." After about several hundred miles into Missouri, it changed to "I can't do this." I stopped somewhere and called up overnight dispatch and said "I'm at a very high risk for falling asleep at the wheel. I need to stop." She was like "Well how long are you going to shut down? Are you going to take a full 10 hrs?" I said "Well that was my plan, since if I stay here for any length of time, I will never beat my 14 hr mark." And she said "You have to help us out here. The thing about CAT loads is they're all hot loads. The Just In Time thing. If the customer doesn't get their product, we shut down whole assembly lines." I had to stifle a laugh at that. I thought most logical systems had redundancies. Do I really hold that much power? Even if that were true how is that supposed to bother me when my life is on the line? Luckily they found SOMEBODY out there to set up a relay.

 

You would think, eh? But it's not so.

I spent eight years on the line at GM/Delphi. They liked to run "Lean" as they called it. Everything was JIT, with absolutely nothing sitting in a warehouse. Pretty much, the parts came off the trucks and we used 'em.

We'd get shut down quite frequently for certain parts--like I-shafts from the Alabama plant. They'd get so desperate for the parts, sometimes they would air-freight them to Detroit or Flint and have a helicopter fly down there to pick them up. They would literally have managers running handfuls of parts over to the line to keep it running.

Final assembly is another story yet. It costs upwards of six figures per minute when a line gets shut down... depending on the vehicle rolling off the line. Believe me, you fall dead on the line, they'll kick you to the side and keep the line running.

And that's what they should do! We are humans... not robots! When a driver can't continue on a load, dispatch needs to have a back-up plan in place. I still don't understand why ALL loads are not relayed. Pick a spot on the map and draw a five-hour radius--one driver takes it to the edge of that circle, and the next picks it up from there. That way a driver could be out ten hours or so and sleep at home at night.

Instead of dispatching loads to a destination, dispatch them to a hub. There has to be a way to make it work.

 

I used to get these "WAKE UP! WAKE UP!" Qualcom messages that flashed and beeped repeatedly very loud in the middle of the night. The messages would be something like "Can you help out? We have a driver 50 miles away needs to relay a load."

I'd tell them I'm in the middle of my DOT break trying to sleep, and they'd say, "Well can you still help?" I'd just unplug the Qualcom and go back to sleep.

 

I can't imagine that qualcomm beeping in the middle of the night. I would never get a goods night sleep waiting for it to go off again.

 

Most of the larger companies have enough trucks and drop yards to accomplish this right now. I think the reason they don't do it, is because then there would be a push to pay drivers by the hour and pay overtime--right now the trucking companies are getting a deal. I'd say most OTR drivers make less than minimum wage when you consider pay divided by hours working.