DC Velocity - June 2019

newsmakers

Shippers won’t blow their freight budgets in 2019, Coyote predicts

As trucking rates continue to slide from the historically high levels of 2018, shippers should take advantage of opportunities before the cyclical market inevitably starts to reverse course, according to Coyote Logistics, a third-party logistics service provider (3PL) and unit of UPS Inc.

Trucking freight rates could begin that rebound as soon as the third quarter of 2019, according to the Chicago-based firm’s Q2 2019 “Coyote Curve” outlook, Coyote Chief Strategy Officer Chris Pickett said in a webcast.

Coyote’s forecast model analyzes three concurrent cycles—seasonal demand, annual procurement, and market capacity—to help supply chain managers identify recurring patterns that can lead to better-informed supply chain and logistics decisions.

The Q2 Coyote Curve shows that the market is now in steep deflation following its historic highs of last year, as current truckload supply now materially exceeds demand and contract rates can even exceed spot rates.

That deflation happened “further and fast-
er” than Coyote’s own previous forecast had
predicted, Pickett said in the webcast, adding
that the projections were thrown off by three
factors:
Since the trucking market’s deflation will
likely continue for another quarter before
beginning to rebound, shippers can be con-
fident they won’t exceed their 2019 freight
budgets due to unplanned exposure to volatile
spot market rates—which are typically higher
than contract rates—as many companies did in
2018, Pickett said.

Supply chain tasks are causing stress for clinicians and affecting patient care, according to a recent survey by healthcare products distributor Cardinal Health.

The fourth annual “Cardinal Health Hospital Supply Chain Survey,” conducted among hospital supply chain decision-makers as well as clinicians, found that doctors and nurses report spending more than twice the amount of time they would like to on supply chain-related tasks, and as a result have less time with patients. In addition, 25 percent of supply chain managers and 20 percent of clinicians reported that supply chain tasks “stress them out,” according to the survey.

Two-thirds of the survey respondents said they have observed clinical staff frustration caused by supply chain-related issues, including: (but are not) has the biggest negative impact on their workplace productivity, while 84 percent of department managers say the same;

b Manual tasks. Almost half ( 49 percent) of frontline providers report manually counting and tracking supplies, with nearly half ( 46 percent) of frontline providers saying this has a “very” or “somewhat” negative impact on their workplace productivity;

b Waste/Overuse of supplies. Seventy percent of respondents cited waste and overutilization of supplies as a “significant” or “somewhat significant” problem within the organization, with a higher percentage of department managers (81 percent) saying the same.

The survey also found that clinicians and supply chain managers have increasing expectations of their surgical and medical supply distributors, with 88 percent saying it was “very” or “somewhat” important that their distributor play a larger role in ensuring their organization’s “seamless operational performance.”

Supply chain tasks weigh heavy in health
care, Cardinal Health survey shows

go figure …

0.2 percent The drop in April U.S. retail sales (on a seasonally adjusted basis) from March, due to delayed tax refunds following the federal government shutdown and to extreme weather, including flooding in the Midwest.