Mitigating US trucking pressures could be as difficult of a question to answer for 2019 as when we were trying to forecast costs for 2018. During 2018, we amplified our efforts around continuing to be a “shipper of choice.” We plan to do the same in 2019 and revisit our network design and our existing processes to see if we have any new opportunities around pooling or load consolidation as our business has continued to grow. We will continue to focus on two items from 2018 for 2019: collaboration and communication.
Collaboration in this type of dynamic environment needs to be more than a catchphrase. One of the ways we are trying to do this in our organization is to partner with our carriers and create a management cadence, including scheduled weekly calls for immediate on-hand service or pressure points, monthly business reviews to evaluate service provided and business tendered, and, finally, quarterly business reviews to discuss how the business is performing from both sides of the relationship.
Underlying our collaboration plan needs to be a high level of communication. In regard to how we interact with our service providers, we are trying to be transparent in our communications. This includes, as best we can forecast, upcoming changes to our business either in volumes or the business model. As previously discussed, when we provide said level of information, we need our providers to collaborate just as proactively with us on any changes they are possibly going to experience. While we’re primarily discussing trucking pressures and how we can try to cope with those pressures, this really is applicable across all modes of transport in our supply chain.