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.
More than 150 years ago, the Gold Rush in California and an increasing market for Asian goods drove demand for just about every commodity. For the merchants of the day, success was a matter of transporting freight from source to market as quickly and reliably as possible. Transit times had to improve, since popular products like tea from China often took so long to arrive on cargo ships that they were stale or damaged by the time they reached customers.
Enter the clipper ships: long, sleek tall ships with billowing sails, loaded to the brim with freight and crashing through waves at previously unimaginable speeds. In fact, China clippers — noted as the fastest merchant vessel — could reach average speeds of more than 16 knots (18 mph). These ships could travel 400 miles per day, compared to the standard cargo ship, which could only travel 150 miles per day. Fast and reliable, they became a truly innovative solution to the long and complex supply chains of the day.
As a result, the tea could get to market before it went bad. And products could get into shops in San Francisco during the Gold Rush heyday with record lead times and within narrower delivery windows. Markets throughout the new American West were created and nurtured, because transit times got faster and reliability got better.
Sound familiar? Clipper ships delivered the way Con-way Freight’s Global LTL service does today — from our OceanGuaranteed® solution out of Asia to our alliance with TNT for expedited service from Europe. Consider this: Typical LCL shipments can take 28 to 32 days to reach the United States from Asia. With OceanGuaranteed, the same LCL shipments take only 17 to 20 days. The clipper ship? Nearly three months!
While our solutions might lack some of the majesty of the historic clipper ships, Con-way Freight is on a mission. To deliver in a changing world where only the best survive.
You may (but probably not!) have noticed that I now refer to transit time concepts as “velocity” instead of “speed”. The reason is to emphasize the purposefulness of our network. Here are the definitions (in case you’re also having a tough time recalling the lectures of your 11th grade physics teacher!):
Speed: The rate of motion.
Velocity: The rate of change of position.
It doesn’t help our customers if we’re moving their freight fast but in the wrong direction.
This article on roundabouts contains a smart point about transit time. It’s not only speed (how fast you’re travelling when you’re moving) and circuity (the directness of the route) that matter. Time in motion is also a big driver of total transit time. For example, a truckload carrier may be able to move a shipment 500 miles in 10 hours, but when will they be able to pick up the shipment, and what will they do when the driver runs out of hours? It can be difficult to secure a same-day pickup in many markets, and unless you’re hiring a team or using relays, the load will have to pause along the way due to hours of service regulations from the DOT.
People may see vehicles winding slowly through a roundabout and think the intersection must be 1) adding to congestion and 2) slowing down people’s travel times. But travel speed at any given moment should not be confused with overall travel time. Drivers may breeze through one intersection’s green lights only to sit through a 90-second cycle at the next. What’s more, the “protected turning movements”—i.e., the green arrows—required at many intersections steal time from the larger numbers of people wanting to proceed in every other direction. Roundabouts slow but rarely stop traffic. A noteworthy example here is Golden, Colo., which in 1999 converted a series of four formerly signalized intersections to roundabouts on a wide section of arterial highway that was becoming a major corridor for “big box” retail. While speeds between the intersections fell to an average of 37 mph from 47 mph, the time to travel the entire stretch of road dropped.
True LTL service from Con-way Freight provides same day pickup service, and utilizes our network to keep shipments moving. If you measure the entire lead time for a shipment to get from origin to destination (including the wait time on the pickup), True LTL service is often faster.
via American drivers should learn to love the roundabout. – By Tom Vanderbilt – Slate Magazine.
