{"id":240,"date":"2018-01-30T02:20:28","date_gmt":"2018-01-30T07:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-03\/?p=240"},"modified":"2018-01-30T02:21:36","modified_gmt":"2018-01-30T07:21:36","slug":"trucking-companies-race-to-add-capacity-drivers-as-market-heats-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-03\/2018\/01\/30\/trucking-companies-race-to-add-capacity-drivers-as-market-heats-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Trucking Companies Race to Add Capacity, Drivers as Market Heats Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

SOURCE<\/a><\/p>\n

Process improvement and process re-engineering have become increasingly important as technology and the world economy change. If a company cannot improve the efficiency or quality of their products or services, they will end up failing fast next to their succeeding competitors. After all, people nowadays do not settle for slow speeds or a lack of quality. Look at what happened to cable companies and video rental stores. <\/span><\/p>\n

The e-commerce industry and the booming economy is heavily increasing demand for trucks on the road to ship products. Retailers are hiring thousands and thousands of trucks for clothing, construction equipment, and other goods as mentioned in the article. To match the heavy demand for shipping, carriers have started to charge 22% more than they did a year ago in hopes that the increase would lead to higher profits. Simple supply and demand economics at play.<\/span><\/p>\n

What trucking companies did not expect was the their struggle to match this heavy demand. Finding drivers for trucks and trucks themselves is easier said than done. What\u2019s more, is that veteran truck drivers are retiring and new laws are coming out that prevent truck drivers on the road if they have been driving for a certain amount of hours consecutively. The trucking companies of the world like JB Hunt Transport earned 13% more in revenue, but unfortunately had operating income fall 5% because of these problems. Without a doubt, a closer look at process improvement, and perhaps even process re-engineering, is necessary in this changing economy.<\/span><\/p>\n

In order to take a closer look, evaluating their current operations is required. If I were to create a fishbone chart to look at \u201cThe Problem\u201d of rising demand for trucks, one option I would look at would be the \u201cPeople\u201d – specifically their wages, training, experience, and the amount of workers. Based on the article, truck drivers are really lacking right now, with an increase of \u201cunseated trucks\u201d (trucks without a driver to drive it). Increasing wages could be a reason for this, preventing companies like JB Hunt Transport to hire new workers without hurting their margins. So, perhaps they could focus their process improvement on the \u201cProcess\u201d – transportation, speed, and quality delivery. This would be ideal because for the incredible amounts of products that need to be shipped.<\/span><\/p>\n

The fishbone chart\u2019s look into the \u201cProcess\u201d can also reveal insight on a possible process re-engineering. While they would be directly competing with Amazon, a new technological shipping trend emerging currently is the idea of drones. If a trucking company were to find a way to approach that market with sound technology, they could completely revolutionize the \u201cProcess\u201d shown in the fishbone chart, and even alleviate some of the problems with the truck driver workers. A company like JB Hunt Transport could do this, given their investments are both in train and truck. It would be an incredible, even insurmountable, task to add air support shipping like drones to their portfolio.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SOURCE Process improvement and process re-engineering have become increasingly important as technology and the world economy change. If a company<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3703,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[71161],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analyzing-processes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3703"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}