California may be the Golden State, but its green initiatives are the most far-reaching in the U.S. The state has a host of agencies and regulations whose aim is to substantially reduce greenhouse gases and other emissions. At the heart of these efforts is the California Truck and Bus Regulation, which seeks to reduce emissions from heavy trucks and buses.
The three states that border the Pacific Ocean are home to 48 million people, with the states just slightly inland adding millions more to the population of the “Western U.S.” With such a sizable chunk of the U.S. population residing in these Western states, West region distribution is a vital part of the supply chains of companies whose products originate in the Central and Eastern U.S.
In recent years, however, multiple factors – the truck driver shortage chief among them – have made long-haul truck runs to the West Coast increasingly unreliable and inefficient. The response of many companies has been to focus less on shipping West and, instead, store products in a West Coast distribution center operated by a third-party logistics provider (3PL).
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: we’re in the midst of a truck driver shortage.
While we may feel that we’ve reached the saturation point in hearing – and reading – about this shortage, the related headlines aren’t going away any time soon. That’s because the shortage isn’t going away any time soon. In fact, we can only expect to hear more about it as the impact to the trucking industry and the nation’s economy continues to worsen.
Here in California, one of the major areas where this impact is being felt is container drayage. The shortage of drayage drivers has recently returned to the headlines as there aren’t enough drivers to handle rising volumes in advance of tariffs and an interest rate hike. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at this shortage and what you, as an importer, can do to keep your drayage freight moving to and from the ports.
Many companies will choose to have their ocean carrier perform “port-to-door” drayage services. While this approach may be convenient, it can also be detrimental to your port-to-market distribution speed as it’s easy to become a small fish in a big ocean carrier pond. When you turn to an asset-based carrier such as a 3PL provider for drayage, its assets are as good as yours.
Your company has made a cost-driven decision to manufacturer in Asia and import from Asia back into the U.S. The by-product of that decision is a much lengthier supply chain and cash cycle. Your job, in logistics, is to mitigate the negative impacts of your import supply chain by designing an efficient U.S. distribution strategy. And one of the first things you will need to decide is your destination port. For this decision, you’ll need to look at the impact of port location on time-to-market, customer satisfaction, freight costs and inventory costs.
Transloading is by no means a new method of product distribution, but the rationale for implementing it has changed over the years. In the past, transload operations were primarily a cost-savings play as the contents of multiple 20-foot and 40-foot ocean containers can fit into relatively fewer 53-foot domestic trailers. This results in fewer trips and therefore lower costs. With the “Amazon-ization” of the supply chain, however, transloading – and its ally, deconsolidation – continues to thrive as a go-to strategy for a different reason: speeding order-to-delivery time.
Air freight shipping. In the eCommerce world, it’s a major component of everyday business. For freight shippers outside of eCommerce, however, it’s far less common than truck, rail, and ocean transport.
There are many transportation services to choose from when deciding which one is the right fit for your business. A company with robust assets – a fleet of actual trucks providing service – paired with a strong network of carrier partners (brokerage) is able to provide a comprehensive, cost-effective transportation solution that may well be the best fit for your needs.
As the Distribution Center Manager for Weber Logistics’ Stockton facilities, and throughout my career in Warehousing, Logistics and Supply Chain, it has become apparent that one of, if not the, most important factors to success in the field is communication.
