draymen as it does long-haul truckload
types. Shook of C.H. Robinson perhaps
best summed up the industry’s predicament by saying he was recently told by a
large trucker that it had more manpower
allocated to recruiting drivers than to
soliciting freight.
MARKET UPHEAVAL
All of this comes as the railroads and the
intermodal community confront a profound change in how product is ordered
and distributed. Rising e-commerce
demand and the accompanying shift in
order fulfillment patterns will require
inventory to be dispersed across a large
number of DCs located closer to the customers. The railroads are handling their
share of e-commerce—the Intermodal
Association of North America (IANA)
reported a 7.7-percent increase in 2017 in
the use of 28-foot trailer “pups,” the type
of equipment utilized to haul the smaller,
lighter-weight goods that are most commonly ordered online.
However, e-commerce’s distribution
characteristics run counter to the railroads’ traditional model of clustering
operations in select large-volume terminals, said Larry Gross, a long-time rail
consultant. The solution, according to
Gross, would be to create a network
of secondary terminals near the freight.
However, that creates challenges of its
own because the vast length of intermodal
trains would make it difficult for smaller
terminals to serve them. How the supply
chain configures the drayage network to
respond to these secular changes in distribution will be a story to play out in 2018
and beyond.
The remedy for sustaining timely and
reliable dray service in a post-Dec. 18
world lies, as it has with virtually every
supply chain management challenge, in
more timely and efficient operations.
Shook said greater emphasis will be placed
on such basic blocking-and-tackling processes as “drop-and-hook,” where a full
trailer’s availability is synchronized with
a truck’s arrival so a driver can dump an
empty trailer, hook up a full one, and be
on his or her way.
But the ultimate responsibility lies with
the railroads, according to Ottensmeyer
of KCS. “Where ELDs could have
a direct impact on dray carriers is
when train service deteriorates in
terms of on-time-performance and
predictability,” Ottensmeyer said in
an e-mail. “A driver waiting will
consume hours of service, so if a
driver had planned to make two dray
runs and the second incoming load
is delayed on rail, he or she may run
out of hours before completing both
runs.” The same scenario applies at
cargo owners’ facilities, where load-
ing dock productivity at a warehouse
can impact waiting times for drivers,
he added.
