Issue link: http://palletcentral.uberflip.com/i/1099303
palletcentral.com PalletCentral • January-February 2019 21 claims of a shortage, has also been growing over the past six years. On top of that, trucks, drivers and rolling stock are rarely where shippers need them to be at the right time. The U.S. suffers from a massive version of the "matchback" problem international shippers face with 40-foot ocean containers. "Matchback" issues arise when import containers wind up in places where there are no goods to refill them once they're emptied. The same increasingly is true not just for ocean containers but for tractor-trailers, straight trucks and truck drivers. This was made painfully clear a year ago, when rising freight demand and limited truck capacity collided with the new U.S. electronic logging device (ELD) mandate, which required truck drivers to stop recording their work hours in easily manipulated paper logs and use ELDs hardwired into their trucks instead. In less than a month, supply chains in the U.S. came up seriously short. After the ELD mandate took effect, transit times for truckload shipments lengthened, as drivers who had skirted hours-of-service rules in the past began to follow them more strictly. Freight tenders for trips as short as 250 to 300 miles were dropped, as drivers and carriers realized they couldn't make those deliveries and return to their base within the 11-hour daily driving limit. If you burned through your routing guide to find a truck in the first quarter last year, this is why. The good news is that trucking companies and owner-operator drivers appear to have come to grips with operating in the ELD era and reset their networks. Many shippers have changed either their The best advice is to sit down and talk with carriers not about price but ways of improving processes and doing business better together. This is a two-way street, or better yet, an interchange where several parties can find ways to move freight efficiently and save money across an enterprise -- including logistics providers, freight brokers, and technology firms.