development and area planning associations in Houston,
Texas.
Voltmann met recently with DC VELOCITY Group
Editorial Director Mitch Mac Donald to discuss the biggest
challenges TIA faces today, the economy, and the call he has
out to the oracle of Delphi.
Q
Could you begin by telling us a little bit about TIA?
ATIA is the largest organization representing third-party logistics companies. We’re at just over 1,200
members and growing. We have been growing in real terms
year over year for the past eight years, and our plan is to
double again over the next five years.
The association was established in 1978 by the 14 licensed
property brokers that existed in the United States prior to
deregulation. They decided to push for deregulation of the
brokerage business and make that a provision of the Motor
Carrier Act of 1980. The association from that day forward
has always been about the free market and ethics. They
established a code of ethics for the industry, and we have
added to it over the years.
to be. I knew it was a diamond in the rough, and I believe
that I have shown it to be a diamond. There is just a really
bright future here. I have more than doubled membership.
We have built an online university of training courses for
our members. We have entered into an agreement now with
the Institute of Logistical Management to double our
online course offerings. We have an insurance company. We
have built a very effective advocacy department. I am more
excited today than I was in June 1997 when I took over.
Q
Who are your members?
AThe majority of our members are
non-asset or asset “light” companies. About a third of our members own
trucks. Maybe two or three hundred own
warehouse space or broker warehouse
space. Maybe 200 are air freight forwarders, a similar number handle ocean
freight, and we have more intermodal
marketing companies than the
Intermodal Association of North
America (IANA)—because we have all
the small ones.
Q
ARight now, one of the key issues is credit management.
One of the reasons that the third-party logistics industry has exploded is these companies use their free cash flow
to become the industry’s bank. What I mean by that is they
pay the carrier as quickly as the day of delivery but don’t
expect to be paid by the shipper for 30 to 45 days. So they
are financing the freight on their own cash flow.
Well, that worked well enough in the days when the market was booming and you could check your shipper’s credit
once and then watch your own receivables from that shipper. But in this market, a shipper can go south on you in 30
days because you don’t have a clear picture of its total
finances. There were credit bureaus like
Dun & Bradstreet that gave you a snapshot
of how the corporation was doing overall,
but there was not any entity looking at a
shipper’s transportation-specific credit.
We have been working for the past three
years—actually since the last dip in the
economy—to build shipper transportation-specific credit reporting. The company that we have been working with,
Forius, launched a product on March 2
that’s going to allow users to track how
shippers pay their small transportation
providers on a daily basis.
What are the key issues for your members right now?
Q
How did you come to be in charge
of this organization?
AI came to know the Transportation Brokers
Conference of America, which is what it was called at
the time, when I was at the Interstate Commerce
Commission during the first Bush administration. Then
when I was at the National Industrial Transportation
League, I worked closely with the association. I actually
tried to get the job before and lost out to Joni Casey. If I had
to pick somebody to lose out to, Joni is a great person to
lose to.
Then the position at IANA opened up, and IANA hired
Joni. I lost that to her, too, but this is where I really wanted
Q
What other issues are you tracking
besides credit?
ALong term, the biggest threat to the industry is from
increased regulation. The industry has worked quite
well since the mid ’90s, when we ended economic regulation
of the industry and concentrated solely on safety. But in the
last Congress, legislation was introduced that would have
required brokers, forwarders, and motor carriers to reveal all
of their costs, all of their income, and every invoice.
This is a devastating thing in any industry. Sure, you’d like
to know exactly how much Best Buy paid for that Sony television or how much the auto dealer paid for that car you
