Open Letter to Crete Carrier Management - Constructive Criticism

Thats actually not the right place lol. They built a new location on 8th Avenue. Take 94 to exit 173 Opportunity Dr. At top of ramp go straight and building is on the left hand side. Easy to find, and there are driver directions in our Qualcomm telling how to get there. GPS should read 6401 8th Ave just fine.

 

He drives for Crete, so of course he's probably sitting somewhere waiting for a load, and thus bored out of his skull.

I'd know, I drove for them for nearly four years. They wouldn't know PRE-planning if hit hit them point blank between the eyes, but they have the audacity to call a post-empty-call load offer "PREPLAN LOAD INFORMATION"

Yeah, OK. And they'll often send one in the middle of the night after you drove all day, and expect you to answer it within an hour, then pull it if you don't.

 

That place is a steaming pile of ####. Current company has drop trailers there. 9 times out of 10 that I go there, I have to live load. TF is the point of having drop trailers, then? Worse yet, the building (they bought the place, didn't build it) has forced blind angle docks.

 

Always fast unload/reload when I've been there. And those blindside docks aren't that bad really. Tons of room between each door. With that said I'd much rather have the R docks that are a nice simple straight back lol

 

I never seem to get the R doors, I'm always low on the S side, ergo the forced blind. If they send me there from the yard next time, I'm just taking a daycab if one is available, screw it.

Of course, I'm always picking up, and I suspect R is for Receiving, and S is for Shipping, so that probably explains it.

 

Eh, those of us who do not chase our 70 tend to be a little protective of our drive time. I cannot count the number of days I have ended with less than 15 minutes of drive time.

Every time I use yard movement, I simply type Yard Move. That's 10 seconds of wasted time, at least twice per stop, for thousands of drivers. If you simply use drive time for yard moves, then it's 5-15 minutes of lost drive time per driver, per stop.

For me or you, it's annoying and doesn't really mean a whole lot, but for a company making money from thousands of drivers, it adds up really quickly.

 

I am an o/o leased to Crete. Work in the same account I worked in as a company driver. Almost a 100% drop and hook reefer account.

Drove 124k paid miles last year for them, including 33 days of downtime for dealing with a engine rebuild and aftermarket warranty.

No, they aren't perfect, but IMHO if you want more reliable miles, you need to politely bother people to get preplans. Again. Politely. Some asset managers are better than others. If I have no preplan and am 300 miles from final, I call and poke appropriate individuals to try and get a preplan. I have a preplan about 50% of the time the day before, and about 75% of the time when I get to final. Most of the rest of the time I have a new load before I can grab an empty and get it washed and fueled.

 

I tried for a while. Never worked. So I gave up.

None of the companies I've worked for since have done the preplan format anyway, even though they actually PRE-plan; they just send the load and if you don't like it or it won't work you call and say so, and they do something about it at that point.

Which means the whole "send a PP in the middle of the night and pull it if no response within an hour" thing makes even less sense. And it irked the #### out of me when I was there. Got to the point where I started sending nastygrams over the qualcomm when they did it.

 

Very well written. Justifiable and very lean. Back in my Manufacturing Management days we were taught and were actively learning the lean culture. Basically eliminating waste and becoming more efficient. Everything was done with seconds in mind not minutes. If you could find a way to eliminate 2 seconds per operation x 1000 operations per shift x 3 shifts x 5 days x 52 weeks you just eliminated 1,560,000 seconds a year, 26,000 minutes, 433 hours x the average employee making $15 an hour $6500 savings per year. Now if that 1 operational savings can be spread across multiple others.... You get the idea. I dove a little to far into what I was trying to say. LOL This industry definitely needs to implement some lean culture.

 

I've worked at a few companies that say they have the "lean" system culture. The Lean system works, WHEN YOU IMPLEMENT IT 100%.These companies were all on board, until they learned they might have to spend money to implement some changes. Then they changed their minds quickly....