After hours in Logistics

As most people are aware of but don't always think about in depth, is that the Supply Chain/Logistics is a twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, and three hundred and sixty five days a year industry. No matter the time of day, week, month or year, a truck is rolling its wheels. On Christmas morning when kids are running down the stairs wide eyed and smiley to open their presents, a trucks is rolling its wheels. When you are on summer vacation enjoying a nice day on the beach, a truck is rolling its wheels. When you are cooking out for the family on the 4th of July in your American flag t-shirt, trucks will be rolling. Driving a truck is by far one of the hardest jobs someone can have have, but also one of the most important. At Scotlynn, this is something we are well aware of this and its' importance, as this plays a big role in our day to day lives. First off, we have an overnight crew that handles check calls and continues to keep in contact with our drivers as they get loaded and unloaded to make sure everything continues to run safe and smoothly.

However, there are going to be those times where you have had a load covered for multiple hours, you might have even left the office for good and started cooking dinner and then all of a sudden, the truck you booked for that load breaks down on the way to the pick up. You then have to spend all of your time focused on finding a new truck to book in good condition, close enough to make the pick up time, that meets Scotlynn standards, and agrees to a price with you, which you probably ended up having to pay more for because your pick up time is now hours sooner. That may be unfortunate in the moment but at the end of the day, cases of water need to get to the grocery store for families, and we need the freight to get to its delivery when our customers told us it needed to get there by. That sentence referring back to my last article on the importance of on time delivery. There is a lot of time, effort, communication, and a high required mental capacity at a fast speed pace in this industry, and none of that ends at 5pm on Friday. There are multiple softwares out there to make this process easier but it is still up to you to go out and find that truck, to hold your obligation to the customer. All of this also needing to be communicated with your customer to keep them up to speed with everything going on with their product. That sentence referring back to my other article, the importance of communication. Checking your emails, keeping your ringer on and being ready for anything at anytime is very important in this industry and things can go from never better to never worse, in seconds. The plus side of this is that, if you do things right, down the smallest of details you have a great chance of not having to deal with these things for the most part. However, even if you do everything right, something out of your control can happen. At the end of the day that is just part of the job, but boy this job is important to a lot of people, even those who have no idea what it took to get that food feeding their families on the shelf.