To celebrate the holidays, Con-way Freight created a special online card to share with customers which features our own unique version of Jingle Bells. Take a listen or play your own holiday tune at www.con-way.com/holiday. Meanwhile, here’s our take on another holiday classic…

‘Twas a Con-way Freight night shift, when through the warehouse
Not a pallet was sitting, alone and without.
The shipments were placed in the trailers with care
And Con-way Freight drivers would soon get them there.

Large shipments with small, all snug in the back
With True LTL Pricing^SM to keep costs on track.
A capped pricing model, refreshingly clear
To keep billing from ruining holiday cheer.

Then out on the dock there arose such commotion
I ran from my office, seemingly in slow motion.
Arriving at dock doors with shock and some awe
I could hardly believe what my wide eyes soon saw.

The parking lot lights shone on hustle and bustle
We all froze and listened … and then heard a rustle.
And what to our highly trained eyes should appear
But True LTL Santa and six tiny reindeer.

A smiling Freight driver who none of us knew
Arrived out of nowhere and into our view.
At Con-way-Freight speed his helpers assembled
And he called out their names as we stood there and trembled.

“Now Faster, now On-Time! Now True LTL!
On Innovative, Simple, Capped Pricing!” he yelled.
To the edge of the lot, and then right through the door
They flew into the warehouse, barely touching the floor.

He didn’t speak much but got right into packing,
Arranging the shipments with care and then stacking.
For near and for far, the large and the tall
True LTL Pricing would cover them all.

Then True LTL Santa ran off to his sleigh
With his six tiny helpers to fly him away.
But we all heard him say as his vessel was rising
Happy shipping to all with True LTL Pricing^SM!

All year long Con-way Freight is committed to providing you the improved exception-free delivery, better on-time service performance and faster transit times you expect from the industry leader. Click the link below to enjoy some additional holiday cheer.

www.con-way.com/holiday

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This past Saturday marked the 118th annual Army-Navy game played in Philadelphia. The game was a close one at halftime, but Navy began to pull away in the second half and won the game 17-3.

John Feinstein wrote on his blog Friday that this contest “is not just a game — it’s an experience.” In fact, it’s one of the purest in the sport. No national titles or prestigious bowl bids are on the line — only pride. Both teams train all year with this one game in mind.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for the men who play in this game, and I’m proud to work for a company that makes a conscious effort to support veterans of our armed forces with job opportunities. Though none of the players will go on to the NFL, all of them will go on to serve on a much more important team.

I love watching the enthusiasm shown by both the Black Knights and the Midshipmen. Being a football fan, I also find the offensive system run by the Naval Academy fascinating.

Known as the “flexbone” offense, it’s a flashback to the days of leather helmets and the single-wing. I first learned this offense as a tailback for my Pop Warner team, and we ran a variant of it in high school as well. In today’s pass-happy football world, this offense shouldn’t work. But Navy has used this system to literally run over teams with faster, stronger and more talented players every season. The Midshipmen beat Notre Dame on the road this year, and they almost beat Ohio State in Columbus as well — an event that would have made all of our Michigan fans here in Ann Arbor very happy.

 The staple play of the flexbone is the triple option, illustrated below. 

(Graphic courtesy ESPN.com)

To the untrained eye, it looks like another one of my True LTL lane maps, but in reality, it’s a very simple and powerful offense.

On running plays, the quarterback always has three choices:

1) Hand off the ball to the fullback for a run up the middle

2) Sprint to the end of the line and keep running into open space

3) Pitch to the streaking tailback, coming around the end behind him

The quarterback uses a “zone-read” scheme to determine which option to choose. Based on the actions of the defensive linemen and safeties, he has to make split-second decisions as to whether to keep, hand off or pitch the ball. Quarterbacks need both intelligence and decisiveness to run this offense — qualities a Naval officer-to-be has in abundance. 

A strong triple option offense has many of the same qualities as a great LTL carrier. 

1) Adaptability. You have to know what your opponents in the industry are doing at all times and react quickly. Can your LTL carrier adapt to your evolving needs?

2) Speaking of fast, the triple option needs a fast tailback in order to outrun lightning-quick linebackers. Carriers need to have similar speed in order to excel with their customers.

3) The quarterback running the triple option needs to be exception-free. He can’t make any mistakes. In football, mistakes lead to turnovers. In business, LTL carrier mistakes could lead to turnovers of a different sort (e.g., loss of income or loss of business).

4) Every element in the triple option has to be delivered on time. If the quarterback hesitates or waits a half-second too long to pitch the ball, disaster can occur. How is your carrier’s on-time service record? 

When an LTL shipper has these triple option characteristics, it ensures a clean handoff of your freight every time. To see that in action, choose Con-way Freight.

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Tag clouds like the one on this blog are visual depictions of the content of websites, with the most important words set off by font size and sometimes color. Generally, the most-used words are the largest. Our tag cloud at right is a great example of that. One look and you’ll notice that “True LTL Pricing” is largest, followed by terms like “no waste” and “sustainability.” For those familiar with our True LTL Pricing, that’s probably no surprise.

As an experiment, I decided to create a commodity cloud: a tag cloud showing the content of shipments that have most benefited from True LTL Pricing. The result was pretty interesting. It gives you a sense of the wide variety of commodities that move through the Con-way Freight network every night — like plastic, rubber and machinery. Less common? Ink, cigars and toilets. Check it out below.

Want to create a tag cloud of your site or data set? Sites like TagCrowd.com, ToCloud.com and MakeCloud.com make it easy.

Image below created using Wordle.net. Special thanks to Con-way Freight employee Matt Wildrick for the commodity cloud concept.

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It’s always interesting to watch people draw maps. Since our business deals so much with geography, I get to see many whiteboard maps every day. Everyone has their own style, and the maps usually reflect individual personalities and experiences in pretty unique ways. As geographic conversations seldom rely on accurate outlines of the United States, it’s entertaining to see how these maps differ from the real thing. Plus, my colleagues’ personal renditions certainly add character to conversations that are otherwise fairly technical.

I’ve collected the U.S. map doodles drawn during meetings at our Ann Arbor office. The process was simple — we asked each person to take no more than 10 seconds to draw a U.S. map with a Sharpie marker on a blank 8.5 x 11 piece of paper. They could draw the map in any style they wanted — a Rorschach test* of sorts. To top it off, we asked them to autograph the maps as well. The results are incredibly fun. We invite you to submit your own U.S. map and see how your design compares. Enjoy!

*The Rorschach test is used to interpret “ambiguous designs” to assess an individual’s personality. Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach created the test in 1921.

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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.

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Running a less-than-truckload network presents the same management paradox described in this New Yorker article on federalism. We need to rely on local teams to make local improvements while reserving central control for network improvements.

The tension between state and national interests isn’t new: it dates back to clashes in the early Republic over programs for “internal improvements.” Of course, the federal government is far bigger than it once was, and yet in the past two decades we’ve delegated more authority, not less, to the states. The logic of this was clear: people who are closer to a problem often know better how to deal with it. But matters of a truly interstate nature, like the power grid, can’t be dealt with on a state-by-state basis. And fiscal policy is undermined if the federal government is doing one thing and the states are doing another. It’s a global economy. It would be helpful to have a genuinely national government.

That’s why we unified our operating model, simplified our network, and standardized on Lean Six Sigma for continuous improvement.

Managing this tension is one of the keys to True LTL.

via The fifty states are hurting economic recovery : The New Yorker.

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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.

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