Maybrook, New York: TA, still

Once again I find myself living at a TA during the beginning of the week. Hopefully I will be getting a load tomorrow morning, but I will not be holding my breath. The load planning department at Falcon is leaving a lot to be desired at this point. If this keeps up I might not be able to hold out until GM restarts and have try out another carrier. Hopefully the issue will resolve itself with the inauguration now done, but if it doesn't I will take another look at Werner.

Now in my eyes the proper way for a planning department at a trucking company to work is that one group works on drivers that need to be moved right now, and another works on loads for those drivers once it is known where they are going. This way a load is already set up, hopefully, once a driver gets unloaded and they can just keep moving. One thing that hampers this type of planning is a lack of knowledge on the planners part of exactly how many hours a driver has available to work with on the next load. This can be worked around by using good estimates of what is needed and leaving some time between unload and reload.

For example the load that got me here was acquired by Falcon on Friday in the early afternoon. Once they got that load they should have immediately had someone looking for something for me to pick up near here on Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning. Now I have no idea if this happened or not, but with over a thousand trucks to plan for, and very few regular runs, it seems likely that all the van drivers are being planned for as they empty at a location, not prior to being empty. So what is likely is that they started looking Monday afternoon, if they even got around to looking for me at all.

This style of planning creates a lot of scrambling and extra expenses. One example of this is fuel being burned to idle the truck or run the bunk heater, the use of Idle-Aire is also an expense to worry about. Both of these costs would be moot if I was rolling on a load. Another expense is an increase in company paid for showers. If I am not running, I am sitting in one location, and free showers only accumulate with stopping places for fuel. So right now the company is paying more for me to sit at this truck stop than if I was sitting in a forty dollar a night motel room. Now I am able to get a room once a week, but prefer to hold on to it until I really need one, either due to a lack of truck stops or just needing a break form the truck.

I have mentioned a willingness to work at the main place and help out with the planning, but I doubt that they will take me up on it, to many toes to step on. Besides, I only have a two year degree in business, most of a four year degree in supply chain (which is basically logistics and purchasing rolled into one), a co-op in the materials and purchasing department of Hayes-Lemmerz, and previous dispatcher and planning experience. So I would be definitely not be qualified to offer a new perspective on the problem. Please note the sarcasm there, the worst of this is that not only am I not making money, but the company isn't either, so we both get to take a spin down the porcelain money cycle if this keep up.