Although its name is a bit misleading, San Antonio Broker Services Inc. is located in North Bergen, NJ.
Michael Miqueli is president of the intermodal trucking company and acknowledges that electronic logging devices (ELDs) have had certainly had an impact on the shipping sector, but their effect stretches beyond the open road to the ports.
His business concentrates on “the last mile, or the shortest haul of trailers or containers,” but ELDs are an issue there too.
Although he believes the ELD mandate and its restrictions weren’t “thought out the way they should have been,” he nevertheless sees the devices as a positive, because “they level the playing field.”
From his view, at the New York area piers, drivers can spend as much as four hours pulling a container, which is costly time to lose. “It’s the difference between being able to deliver today and having to hold the trailer or container until tomorrow,” Miqueli says.
The new regulations, he says, have “changed the way we operate our dispatch. It’s not ‘load and go’ anymore.”
Miqueli confirms a clear uptick in intermodal, saying the company has had “more loads so far this year compared to any other year.”
He says buyers are becoming more accustomed to the “seven-day transit time and are changing their buying to accommodate the extra days.”
Bottom line, ELDs and the capacity crunch are an impediment in perishables.
“The driver shortage is real,” he says. “There’s no way around it.”
Over time, though, he believes intermodal will become more and more efficient. It, too, he says, is here to stay.
Due to the constraints, the industry continues to find ways to adjust, says Evan Kazan, director of business development for Target Interstate Systems Inc.
These include increased flexibility with receiving times and dates and cutting down on wait times with shorter unloading windows.
Trucks are making customer drops “before coming to the market while in route or avoiding the market all together. If they do come to the market, they’re working to unload trucks more efficiently to be more cognizant of their hours of service restrictions,” he says.
Another change shippers have made to accommodate the increasingly difficult juggling act is moving to appointment-setting systems to help “manage and coordinate loading and delivery schedules,” Kazan says.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if all shippers and receivers move to an appointment system in the near future.”
Luckily, there are a wealth of transportation management systems available for businesses of all sizes.
This is an excerpt from the most recent Produce Blueprints quarterly journal. Click here to read the full article.
