Please welcome guest blogger Charles Rosa, an operations research principal at Con-way Freight.

– Sean Devine

Our family routinely takes a vacation from our home in Michigan to visit relatives in Atlanta for a week each spring. We generally take this trip by car since we love the scenery, especially the mountainous areas of Kentucky and Tennessee.

We approach one portion of road along this route with a mixture of excitement and fear, however. That is the Jellico Pass, which cuts through the Cumberland Mountains and, on a clear day, provides an incredibly scenic view of beautiful Appalachia. The amazing view explains our excitement; our fear is caused by the fact that the high pass can be (and often is) shrouded in fog or heavy rains so dense that the driving can become treacherous.

On the bad days, we slow the car to a crawl and the drive becomes something we simply endure — and something that guarantees a late arrival at our relative’s home. With that in mind, we always make sure to pad our schedule for the trip, since we don’t know whether the drive will go smoothly. This means less time spent exploring the attractions of Atlanta.

It’s simply the cost of the uncertainty associated with inclement weather.

We face similar kinds of uncertainty here at Con-way Freight. Uncertainty around the transit time of nearly all the legs in our network, and uncertainty around the amount of demand for shipping services that we will face from day to day. For Con-way Freight, that means extra costs.

Extra costs for the manpower to staff a network with reserve capacity to handle spikes in demand, all the while operating more slowly than it otherwise would have without the risky transit legs. Still more charges for the additional reserve trucks and trailers necessary both to handle unusually large demand and for use as replacement vehicles in the event of weather-induced problems on those risky legs. Finally, additional extra fees (quite literally) for the higher premiums needed to insure transit of freight under the dangerous conditions associated with trips through mountain passes and the like. These costs are incurred not once (like on my trip to Atlanta), but continuously, since we run service across all of our legs throughout the year.

In the coming months and years, Con-way Freight will continue to work hard with its customers to try to control any uncertainty it can. While we may not be able to control weather, we can start to collaborate more closely with our customers to reduce the variability of demand around which we plan our operations on a day-to-day basis. This effort will benefit all of us in the form of reduced costs. That’s good news for Con-way Freight and our customers.

Charles Rosa is an operations research principal at Con-way Freight. He has been with the company since August 2009, working on analytical models to support its strategic and operational decision making. Prior to Con-way Freight, he worked at General Motors R&D, where he was a staff research engineer. In that role, his contributions included the development of an optimization/statistical model-based revenue management system that is being used to inform pricing/production decisions across GM’s entire portfolio of vehicles.

Charles received his Ph.D. in operations research from the University of Michigan.

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It’s no secret that most professional truck drivers — at Con-way Freight and throughout the industry — are men. As we work toward increasing the diversity of our workforce and attracting more women to professional truck driving, I thought it would be interesting to talk to a female driver about her experiences behind the wheel and in the field.

For that, I went to Amy Day, a driver sales representative at the Con-way Freight service center in my native Albany, N.Y. The four-and-a-half-year veteran of the company drives a pickup and delivery route from Albany to Bennington, Vt. — a big change from her previous life as a health care worker and competitive powerlifter. Below, Amy talks about her job and the experience of being a woman in a mostly-male environment.

How did you get started as a driver?

I didn’t really know anything about trucking. I was working in a hospital as an exercise physiologist and the money wasn’t very good. We had a dump truck operation in my town [Burlington Flats, N.Y.] and I thought, “Well, I could probably drive that,” but when I called up the driving school they said they only taught tractor-trailers. I didn’t want to do that, but the woman on the phone suggested I stop by to talk to her. I went and talked to her … and started driving school the next weekend.

After that, I worked over-the-road for a year and then bought my own truck and had that for four years. When the engine blew, I stayed local and eventually found Con-way Freight.

What is it like working for Con-way Freight compared to other companies you’ve worked for?

I really like the people here. When I first came in for an interview, everybody was friendly. I’d been to a couple of other places for different jobs where everybody just kind of stared, but over here everybody was nice and introduced themselves. It’s a great atmosphere.

What do you like most about the job?

I like being on the road. You have to do your job but you also have freedom. It’s almost like you’re on your own — you don’t have a boss looking over your shoulder. You can kind of do things the way you want to and make your own decisions.

Why do you think there aren’t more women LTL drivers in the industry?

When I called my first LTL company, they said it would involve dock work and I thought, “I don’t want to do that” and never took the job. Then, later on, I decided it wouldn’t be that bad. It’s hard work — we pretty much load and unload ourselves. But some of the women I talk to don’t like the idea of being on a cold dock all day.

What is it like for you as a female driver working with mostly male drivers?

When I first started here, it was a little intimidating because it’s mostly men and you don’t really know how they’re going to feel about a female coming in. But I didn’t have any trouble at all. Everybody’s treated me with respect here and they don’t treat me any different than anyone else, which is nice. As long as you do your job, everything is fine.

After my first interview, people kept asking me, “Do you think you can handle this?” and that made me determined that I would.

What advice would you have for a woman considering a career as a truck driver?

I’d advise her to go for it! I’ve had friends I’ve tried to get to drive but they’re just … afraid. You hear a lot of the old stories about how men don’t want women in the trucking industry, but it’s really not like that anymore.

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With the recent blizzards pounding the mid-Atlantic part of the country, I started to think about how our LTL network adapts during weather emergencies to make sure our customers still receive their freight shipments in as timely a manner as possible.

Service center manager Jeff Raske of Fargo, N.D., and freight operations manager Damian Boyd of Romulus, Mich., have to deal with weather conditions like this frequently due to their locations in the Snow Belt. Jeff has lived in North Dakota most of his life and has many years of experience dealing with brutal winters. Damian, however, is spending his first winter in a northern climate after spending most of his Con-way Freight career in southern states.

Even though Jeff and Damian have different levels of winter experience, both said they adapt to severe weather by keeping safety number one and using three other key strategies — preparation, communication and teamwork.

Preparation begins as early as November through driver education. Tailgate meetings take place at both service centers where managers review the precautions each driver should take. Jeff and Damian run down a checklist that includes dressing appropriately for conditions, packing an emergency bag and instructing drivers on how to use block heaters so tractors will start up in the cold weather. Con-way Freight drivers also use fuel additives to keep diesel from gelling up in extreme cold.

When a storm is on the horizon, Jeff and Damian have checklists of their own to run through. They both contact local snow removal companies to make sure they start monitoring the freight yards to keep the lots clear. They also take a look at shipping schedules in advance to anticipate possible problems and try to deliver time-sensitive freight early in lanes potentially affected by the storm.

Communication between drivers, dispatchers and customers is critical during a snowstorm. During a recent storm, Damian’s dispatcher communicated frequently with state police to check on road closures. Having an idea of when roads would reopen let him plan alternate routes and combine shipments to compensate. The dispatchers also keep drivers apprised of weather conditions so they can make good decisions about the next legs of their journeys.

In North Dakota, Highway 29 in and out of Fargo shuts down completely several times a year. Because of situations like that, Jeff maintains close ties with the service center manager in Bismarck. The two service centers often work together to overcome irregularities in the network caused by weather. Last year, when Fargo experienced severe flooding, Jeff stayed in constant contact with both the Bismarck service center and his customers to adjust day by day as the North River rose and receded.

Teamwork by the people in our network keeps it running through the worst weather conditions. In one of the recent storms, Damian faced the biggest snowstorm he has ever had to work through. Blustery conditions in Ohio clogged many shipping lanes and jeopardized Monday delivery. To compensate, the Romulus service center set up weekend operations and many drivers and dockworkers put in overtime to make sure LTL shipments arrived on time. Teamwork between the line haul department, dispatchers and drivers helped move freight around the storm as highways began to open up again.

Con-way Freight’s vast network of service centers, trucks and trailers allows us to adapt whatever conditions winter brings. And with employees like Jeff and Damian to execute critical adjustments within the network, customer freight doesn’t get left out in the cold.

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Today, the True LTL blog presents its first guest blogger. Olga Raskina (see bio below) works in Operations Research at Con-way Freight, so creating models that represent various elements of our freight network is nothing new to her. Here, she compares the fine art of packing a woman’s purse to that of loading freight on a truck. Enjoy! — Sean Devine

Have you ever looked inside a woman’s purse? It’s amazing the variety of things even the tiniest of them contains. Every time I pack a different purse to go somewhere, I face the same vexing problem — how do I efficiently put everything into it so that my pile of necessary items fits, nothing breaks and the smallest items are easy to get to when I need them? My goal is to avoid that horrifying moment when I have to shake everything out on the floor trying to find my car keys.

As I was packing my purse to go to a show last night, I couldn’t help but think that this is the problem we solve every day when we load our trucks for deliveries. The problem is hard to solve quickly and optimally in both worlds. A simple approach would be to put heavy or less-used things at the bottom, put what I need often — like a cell phone — where it’s easy to reach, and always put car keys where I can see them. This is very similar to how an LTL carrier would load freight on a truck.

At first glance, it seems like this approach should work well. Which it does — except when the purse is too small to hold everything or too large to allow you to find anything quickly. Determining the best trade-off between space and ease-of-use makes the problem very complicated.

The purse-size analogy is an easy way to relate to freight operations. For example, do I load two pups or a van? If all of the freight can be loaded directly on a single-lane van, that’s the best option. If the freight will require extensive re-handling or is out for final delivery, it’s more efficient to load pups and maybe even send them on two different routes. While this small example might seem obvious, making these decisions for the entire nationwide network simultaneously can quickly become complex.

Back to the purse model — assuming I do need that box of Band-Aids at the show tonight along with everything else I usually pack in my purse, how do I decide how large my purse should be? How do I know if everything will fit? With my purse, I can take everything out and repack, which is annoying but possible. With freight on a truck, it’s not that easy.

Here are charts of my potential time to pack and find an item, and the chances of everything fitting into a sample small, medium and large purse.

You can see that as the size of the purse decreases, the difficulty to pack it grows accordingly — but so does the probability that something won’t fit. Then, once packed, the time it takes to find things actually decreases. Concurrently, the time to find something rises if the purse is packed too tightly. Which suggests two natural conclusions — it’s best to be conscious about what you really need and also determine the adequate purse size (not too small, but not too large, either) to carry it.

These, in fact, are some of the keys to efficient LTL operations as, well.

Olga Raskina is an Operations Research principal at Con-way Freight. She has been with the company since August 2009, working on analytical models to support its strategic directions. Prior to Con-way Freight she worked at the software company Emptoris, where she held the lead scientist position, leading research efforts for all the company’s products.

Olga received her Ph.D. in Operations Research from Columbia University.

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In an interview for an article that appeared in the Jan. 25 issue of the Journal of Commerce , Greg Lehmkuhl, EVP of Operations at Con-way Freight, provided great insight into our definition of “fast.”

“For the first time, we’re actually measuring our transit time in hours instead of days … We’ve made a concerted effort over the past year to accommodate our customers’ late shipping needs and to deliver earlier in the day.”

We’re excited that we’re still finding ways to reduce costs while improving the service that we provide. This article, “Carriers Tighten Transit Times,” provides more details about the thinking behind our most recent network optimizations and can be found at www.joc.com/trucking/carriers-tighten-transit-times.

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We’re pleased to finally be operational with the latest optimizations to our freight flow.  We implemented this latest round of network adjustments on Monday, January 11^th. They are the latest in a series of high-impact changes that we’ve made to our network during the last two years. The changes adjusted the flow of freight in a few key corridors to run more direct paths where we have the density required to do so efficiently.

To make it easy to understand what we changed, we (thanks Olga) graphed the freight flows on Thursday, January 7^th and Thursday, January 14^th for the load plan legs that connect Houston, Texas and Burlington, Vermont.

The orange line shows the old flow. The size of the line is the total volume of freight travelling on that linehaul leg. We used to travel way out of the way and risked getting caught in the snow in the Midwest while moving freight from Texas to New England. Through analysis by our linehaul team, we were able to find the more direct blue route with high enough density to reduce the total number of miles that we drive. This path also helps avoid some of the winter weather that can threaten on-time service performance.

Hundreds of adjustments like this were made to our network last week. We’re excited by the positive impact that these changes will make to our service levels and cost structure. Enjoy!

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