DC Velocity - March 2016

NAA-1078 ISS: 1/16

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Make sure start time
is “go time”

a Dec. 14 conference call. “You often
get people in the ‘hopper’ who are quick
to leave, and therefore you need to replace
even more people. And so we are trying to
stop this vicious cycle and trying to see how
can we use analytics ... to attack that.”
A company typically conducts employee
surveys at such points as prehiring, during
training, and throughout the employees’
careers, Stay Metrics founder and CEO Tim
Hindes said on the call. Only when a compa-
ny understands the cause of turnover can it
react by hiring drivers who will not stumble
over those pain points, he said.

Common complaints reported by Stay Metrics’ clients, spanning 50 carriers and 15,000 drivers, include confrontational dispatchers who frequently agitate drivers; shippers that are late in making loads available and burn through drivers’ available hours of service; and a lack of route flexibility.

Another way to avoid driver shortages is to extend the careers of current employees, said Judge. Firms can pursue this goal by using predictive analytics to reveal the typical characteristics of their most successful drivers or most profitable accounts. Firms can encourage other drivers to emulate those best practices by creating “ loyalty programs” to reward employees for attributes such as safety, productivity, and ontime pickup and delivery performance.

“Driver-retention managers are senior executives now that actually have the title ‘Driver Retention’,” said Hindes. “Five years ago, it was very rare for somebody to have the word ‘retention’ in their title. Ten years ago, it was unheard of, and I think that most carriers now have somebody focused on that.”

—Ben Ames
go figure …

83%

The probability automation will replace workers making less than $20 per hour. Many warehouse workers fall under that salary range.

SOURCE: WHITE HOUSE COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISERS

XPO to rationalize $3 billion in global
spend during 2016, CEO says

Transportation and logistics service provider XPO Logistics Inc. will
rationalize about $3 billion in enterprisewide spending in 2016 by rene-
gotiating legacy line-haul contracts and leveraging its burgeoning size to
enhance its buying power, the company’s chairman and CEO said.
Bradley S. Jacobs said XPO has already put out bids on about $500
million in line-haul business handled by outside carriers on behalf of the
former Con-way Freight, the less-than-truckload (LTL) unit that XPO
absorbed when it bought parent Con-way Inc. last September for $3 bil-
lion. Some of those contracts had not been rebid since 2009, Jacobs said.

Jacobs added that Greenwich, Conn.-based XPO is re-evaluating $600 million in global spending, with much of that coming from Europe, where the company is a major player following its April 2015 acquisition of French logistics giant Norbert Dentressangle S.A. for $3.5 billion. Purchases under rebid run the gamut from trucks to lift-truck equipment to office supplies, Jacobs said in a phone interview.

Later this year, XPO will rationalize $1.9 billion in global spending, a project that will be executed in two intervals, Jacobs said. Included in the spending reset will be a portion of the $3 billion in transportation services purchased by XPO each year, Jacobs said. XPO’s freight brokerage unit procures transport capacity for thousands of customers. p. 21