Adapting to the Dynamic Logistics and Transportation Industry

Challenges and Trends Impacting the Logistics and Transportation Industry

Some of the biggest challenges in the logistics and transportation industry can (ironically) be attributed to supply chain disruptions.  Longer-than-expected lead times for equipment and materials and the rapidly rising costs of trucks, trailers, and material handling equipment, as well as historically low vacancy rates on commercial real estate, have made the smooth onboarding of these assets much more difficult to pull off than in the past.  Contingency planning has become much more important (and difficult) than it had previously been, as getting the equipment, people, and freight to come together at the same time has been a bigger challenge than it has historically been.

Major Predicaments in the Logistics and Transportation Industry

Doing everything we can to deliver a great employee experience for our people.  When we take care of our people, they are going to do a great job taking care of our clients, and that allows us to grow profitably and give back to the communities we do business in. 

 One way we do that is by growing and diversifying our client base to remove some of the volatility from our portfolio to where we can better balance capacity peaks and valleys due to things like seasonality, component shortages, and product demand changes.  This is still a very people-centric business and the ability to recruit, develop, and maintain great employees is the key to our success, those things are very difficult to do if we are too dependent on a small group of clients.

Latest Project and Some of the Technological and Process Elements Used in It

We are working on better integrating our various transportation service offerings (irregular-route TL, yard services, dedicated contract carriage, freight brokerage) to deliver the optimal solution for the client.  Some lanes may require dedicated assets and others will require a mix of our assets and brokerage depending on the day of the week or seasonality in the marketplace.  We have done this with a mix of third-party systems as well as custom development work by our internal IT staff to ensure we are providing the best value and visibility to our clients every day, as well as maximizing our capacity to meet their changing needs.

‘When we take care of our people, they are going to do a great job taking care of our clients, and that allows us to grow profitably and give back to the communities we do business in’

Exciting technological trends for the future of the Logistics and Transportation industry

The automation and/or elimination of non-value-added tasks is a trend that I fully believe creates great value on both sides of the supplier/client relationship.  This allows people to spend more time and focus on things that bring tangible benefits to our clients and allows our clients to better serve the needs of their customers.  Things like robotic process automation (RPA), optical character recognition (OCR), and self-serve portals can streamline back-office tasks and eliminate unnecessary friction from the routine transactional tasks that happen daily.  Something simple like a driver being able to check himself or herself in prior to arriving at the warehouse can speed up dock assignments and get the driver back out on the road more quickly, eliminating the headache and likely improving the accuracy and visibility of most current processes.