Swift Transportation

Probably loads with wide open delivery times, the system dosent let drivers see the actual agreed upon delivery windows. And the advantage of such a large trailer fleet, the company can take something with way to much time on it, and park the load and charge storage.

 

Swift actually uses load tracking as a selling point, and it is pretty decent, they can get the trailer location right within about a city block in most cases, sometimes down to a few hundred feet. Don't know how well it works on the customers end, but it works well in the system (most of the time.)

 

Correctomundo; FerrissWheel is on to something:

Laredo is a cross border terminal for Swift. All loads in the Larado terminal have or are crossing the Tex-Mex boarder. As such, their are a dozen different reasons a load can be held up. It could be stuck at customs. I could be turned back for more paper work. It might be waiting on paperwork. It could be stuck in a long line at the boarder. Immigration could have detained it. It might be stuck at the brokers yard. It could be stuck just short of the boarder on a Trans-Mex truck that is really just a 30 year old Swift truck with all the great Swift repairs. It could be in the shop at the terminal. Their are dozens of different excuses that can hold up a Mexican-Swift shipment. That is why cross boarder shipments have a large delivery window.

If a planner should run over the delivery window running this scam their are several avenues to CYA. Such as:

Find a driver that does not trip plan his loads. Dump the load on him, and when the late delivery comes write up a service failure for the driver and blame the whole situation on the driver. That was the easiest and most common solution at the time.

Find a driver that will write just run over the hours and write paper to make it look good. Also very common at Swift during the paper log book error.

Chances are if you with a terminal full of drivers waiting for loads, you would have no problem dumping any late load on one of the two drivers described above. But if all else fails you could call the consignee, and reschedule a delivery with one of the reasons given as an excuse from the first paragraph.

All this was happening in the era of Swift when they were using the Qualcom from the 80's and truck tracking was in it's infancy. When Swift moved from that early Qualcom to the elogs, the MCP200, and more modern truck and trailer tracking is just about the time the scam in Laredo was busted: around 2011-2012. Truck and load tracking on the 80's Qualcom was lucky to locate the truck and trailer in the same state it was in. Things changed when new tracking equipment appeared on the trucks.

Not that a blind man could't see their was something wrong in Laredo. It was pretty obvious.

 

Nice story ... Some planners, worked a deal with some local Laredo drivers to give them priority for a taste. Unethical, yep. But was there some convoluted scheme to sell freight, nope.

So the Laredo drivers got the DH loads sitting in the terminal. The OTR drivers got to go down to Killian for a live load. No freight sat and the only time drivers sat was if there was no freight.

Additionally planners couldn't hold/hide freight if they wanted to. The CSRs put the freight in the system and manage it through the system. Planners put freight on trucks. If the freight isn't on a truck when it's supposed to be, the CSR will start chirping at the planners. Once it's on a truck, the CSRs will start chirping at the driver.

 

If something like that were to happen at swift today would anyone notice it?

 

Green dots are loads without trucks and red dots are trucks without loads.

 

Holy ####. Glad I'm not dry. I've had two loads back to back for the past month. And I'm running solo right now.

 

That is A LOT of red...

 

I'm pretty sure you can use a macro 34 to get the delivery windows for a load. I'm dedicated so I can't use it but line haul should be able to. Anytime I've called to see if there was a window I got an answer right away.