Elevation - Patrick's Truck Ride (Speed of Execution Testimonial)

Patrick Selvy, our Truckload Cost Elevation Catalyst teammate, decided that he needed to do a ride-along to understand our processes and procedures.   We located a Truckload delivery in the Northwest Arkansas area and Patrick met our driver at the Lowell Terminal this morning.   

 

 Our assignment was a drop and hook delivery at Walmart in Bentonville, AR.  This is what it looks like in our system (yes, I used the host):

 

Notice this load shows two drops at the same DC.   

Our team left the Lowell yard at 0903 A.M..  They drove on I-49 north to their delivery.  They experienced one collision mitigation alert due to a tanker truck that slowed down and we encroached on our existing space cushion. 

We arrived at the gate in Bentonville at 9:29 a.m..  We had one driver in front of us (JB Hunt).  Our team was instructed to drop their loaded trailer in zone E.  The driver was asked to show his drivers license and produce the Walmart delivery number.  Our driver was stressed out that he did not have the right number and ran from the guard shack back to the truck to write down the information from his tethered Peoplenet unit.  Does this sound archaic?

Our team logged on-duty not driving and proceeded to the drop zone.  We successfully dropped our trailer in 8 minutes.  Our challenge now is to find an empty trailer.  Our driver told us that he normally looks for trailers that start with 66 so he can locate a newer box that will be more reliable and also has the technology that drivers desire (tire pressure sensor light, better door locking systems, etc).  Our team located an older trailer (#51786) and the doors would not successfully close.  Our driver had already swept out the unit and invested time in it, but knew if he picked it up he would have to go get it repaired.  We spent 13 minutes on this box, but surrendered it for better selection.  The bad part of this trailer story---the next driver who hooks up to this box now gets to deal with this issue.  We need an easy way for a driver to communicate a problem trailer in the field without having to spend great amounts of time on a box that does not make them any compensation.

So, the team drove to another area and found box #661700.  This is a new trailer and the pick-up process was seamless.  This second trailer took another 10 minutes of time to locate and hook up.   Now that we had secured an empty, our driver entered the data from the two drops (need to understand why it shows two drops instead of one?).  The two drops forces the driver to enter two unload calls and take time out of their clock.  During this process he educated Patrick on this issues around the constant rebooting issues and pop-up information that takes you off the entry screens and makes you have toget back to the data entry point you were already in.

So, at 10:23 am we were finally finished with our unload call and had 1.2 hours invested in a drop and hook in Bentonville, AR that was 10 miles away.

Here are some other talking points that we can use to educate ourselves:

•  Our driver was in a gently used International truck.  The other J.B. Hunt Truckload driver was in a new Freightliner.  These two drivers conversed and compared tenure.  Our driver had almost a year of experience with our company and the other driver had only 4 months with our company.  This created a conversation around truck assignment.
• Our driver loves his fleet manager.  The manager met our team when they returned to the terminal.  Our driver shared that he had an interest in driving for our Georgia Pacific fleet, but feared losing his fleet manager.
•  Our driver mentioned that the last 2 b-services he experienced took 3 days to complete.  He lost wage ability due to not having another option (truck) to work with during the downtime.
• Our driver is a rehire.  He experienced a very dirty truck during his first stint with J.B. Hunt.  He got tired of waiting for his truck to be presented to him and went back to a competitor.  One of our recruiters worked tirelessly to get him back to the company and so kudo's to our recruiters  for getting this driver back to our company.

So, the information shared in this blog entry shows how much information can be shared during a simple delivery and some of the barriers to a smooth drop and hook experience.