Random LTL Rants (all are welcomed)

Mike2633 said: ↑
What does "milk run" mean is that like a manufacturer shipping a partial order just so the plant can get through the day. Same way if you have groceries at you're house, but you're out of milk you would go to the store just to get milk and maybe a couple other small things but not the same as real major grocery shopping?
Click to expand...

Milk run is a scheduled pick up of parts from multipe suppliers (generally 4 or 5) in matching
quantities.The type of parts involved are low/medium volume parts with numerous variants which come from suppliers that are ten of miles from the assembly plant or a merge in transit
cross dock; and of each other. A merge in transit cross dock is used to support milk run routes
serving remote suppliers from the assembly plant. The incoming parts are then unloaded and
consolidated with other mixed parts and loaded on outbound trailers in truckload quantities
to be shipped to the assembly plant.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Schedule-collection-System-Milk-Run_fig1_305001363

In the automotive industry, in average (70%) of the parts, including sequenced parts, come in
truckload, (25%) through milk run networks and (5%) through common carrier LTL networks

 

First time I have heard someone saying milk run. Learned something new today.

 

I don't know what "milk run" means in the FedEx world I don't speak fluent FedEx, but I can tell you what "milk run" meant in the world of one of the biggest (now gone) ever the TNT companies.



Talkin' Trucks With Mike:A History of the TNT Companies

or try this one:

Talkin' Trucks With Mike:A History of the TNT Companies

 

For us a milk run is a repeating run, base expectations of same time every day. Some locations call it a milk run we just call it our line haul. Or loo. (As it comes from Waterloo Iowa...)

 

When both me and the pickup driver made an executive decision and said "No ##### way are we going out in this, especially when all the roads are shut down."

 

I always heard it as an easy run. Perhaps I misspoke?

 

Uhh it's called gravy run.

 

My bad.

 

Wikipedia says milk run originated during WW II as a term for a mission likely to encounter minimal resistance.

I think the locomotive engineer described in Set Up Running might disagree with that origin, having stopped doing milk runs in 1949 when he retired after hiring in the early 1900's, IIRC. His run consisted of gathering loaded tank cars at sidings along the way, building up a train of loads for a processing plant.

Many terms today are derived from the world of ships and railroads, reefer came from hand-rolled cigarettes shaped like a reefed sail on a square-rigger. I'm betting that milk run dates to the late 1800's anyway, but perhaps wasn't widely used because it was an industry term.

Wikipedia also says... "In the context of logistics, according to Winfrid Meusel, milk runs were any routes that originated by identifying potential circular tours, whereby the utilization of trucks could be increased and logistics costs could be reduced.[3]"

Which is more what Mike was saying and much like I'm doing right now, we take an empty everywhere and exchange for full.

Unless the plant is broken when we need to live unload and we spend New Years Eve and Day in a factory lot because the upper manglement can't be bothered to answer their phones and fix issues on their special days with no consequences.

We're being unloaded (slowly) by a guy who is technically on vacation (you just know he'll be paid extra for that) because no one on top at Danona took responsibility for staffing and whole shifts have gone unmanned so trucks are backing up, and of course no shippers were notified, because it's a holiday stupid..

But god forbid that a worker bee doesn't "own" his job or "take ownership" of a situation. I'd like to sell my job back for 500, Alex, since I "own it".

Anyway, those Valley people are always starting trouble with careless use of phrases and they deserve getting snowed on. :^)

 

We tend to call them hayrides.
Super easy, LOOKING, routes on paper.
That can (have) unravel as fast as they were typed into the computer.