Logistics Viewpoints

A complete analysis of logistics trends, technologies, and services

This Week in Logistics News (November 11-15, 2013)

Regulations | By •

Lots of interesting news to discuss today, so let’s go straight to it.

Lots of news this week related to omni-channel fulfillment and order delivery. First, Descartes unveiled new optimization technology at its user conference that “helps retailers and distributors make deliveries the same day an order is taken.” Here are some details from the press release:

Descartes’ innovative new continuous optimization technology enables dispatchers to receive, automatically assign and execute orders throughout the day, placing pick-up or delivery orders on the routes best suited to meet the customer appointment requirements and operational cost constraints. Using real-time GPS-based fleet statuses Descartes’ same-day delivery optimization technology can more accurately predict new delivery times and drive greater delivery efficiencies.

 

Descartes’ new same-day optimization technology is part of Descartes’ Route Planner solution, which provides advanced route planning and execution in a single architecture.

In a separate press release, Descartes announced that Sears Holdings Corp. has selected its home delivery solution “to enhance its ability to serve customers and improve the efficiency of its home delivery operations.” According to Jeff Starecheski, Vice President Logistics Services at Sears Holdings, “Customer service is of paramount importance to Sears Holdings, our members and customers. We continue to make investments to remain a leader in home delivery. We chose Descartes’ home delivery solution because of its innovative approach and comprehensive capabilities from delivery appointment scheduling right through to mobile-enabled proof-of-delivery.”

Also this week, news that Amazon and the United States Postal Service (USPS) have partnered to deliver packages to customers on Sundays. The service will begin in Los Angeles and New York on November 17, with plans to expand it to Dallas, New Orleans, Houston, Phoenix, and other cities next year. You can read my commentary from earlier this week for my take on this news, which in a nutshell, is another chess move in the Amazon vs. Brick-and-Mortar match, another chapter in the omni-channel fulfillment story.

And in Women’s Wear Daily, an interesting article highlighting how the Gap is rolling out ship-from-store capabilities across its network, and introducing a new program called “Reserve” where shoppers select items online and have them held in the stores for purchase and pickup. What I found most interesting, however, was something the company developed three years ago:

The foundation [of Gap’s technology-drive strategies] was set three years ago when the company built a search engine that can locate every piece of inventory, which is instrumental in matching the demand with the assortment. That led to last year’s introduction of Gap’s “find in-store” feature on its Web site, which determines where a shopper is and, on a real-time basis, tells them the nearest store to find that item, in the color and size that they want. The Web site also gives the probability of getting the item [emphasis mine]; in other words, whether it’s a certainty, whether the store is down to a few units, or whether it’s not worth the trip since the item is probably no longer available.

What the Gap is doing underscores how mobile and BI/analytics technologies are playing an important role in omni-channel fulfillment — and how the users of inventory management systems are not just the inventory analysts at headquarters or store managers, but also millions of consumers walking around with smartphones and tablets looking to buy an item now.

Shifting gears, I was very pleased to read the news that the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland plans to integrate Resilinc SupplyIntel into its supply chain course curriculum “for the purpose of educating future business leaders on supply chain risk management best practices.” As I’ve written and spoken about many times this year, many companies are falling short on supply chain risk management, which is having a negative impact on their financial performance and eroding their market share. I also believe companies need to rethink supply chain risk management — that is, make thinking about supply chain risk part of their corporate DNA, where conversations about risk are as common and instinctual as conversations about cost and service. Getting these conversations started at the university level with future supply chain leaders is a great step forward.

Finally, there was a great article this week in the Wall Street Journal about Hours of Service and its impact on drivers, which echoed some of the points I raised last week in Hours of Service: The “Obamacare” of the Trucking Industry? The article profiles the experience of Manuel Hernandez, a long-haul truck driver. Here are a couple of notable quotes from the article:

“Who made up these [new HOS] rules,” he asked, shaking his head. “Did they have any experience in driving truck, and traffic and dealing with customers and your breakdowns?”

 

Mr. Hernandez is required to take 10 consecutive hours of rest to promote a circadian rhythm sleep cycle. The problem with imposing a rule like that on a trucker’s unpredictable schedule, he said, is that “sometimes when you’re not tired, you have to sleep and when you’re tired, you have to drive.”

The article also shed light on an important fact that sometimes gets overlooked: shippers have a big influence on driver productivity too. “On a recent trip from East Rutherford, N.J., to Dallas,” the article reports, “[Mr. Hernandez] could only stand by helplessly and watch as it took eight hours for workers to unload mattress foam by hand from his truck.” And Anne Ferro, FMCSA’s administrator, questioned whether it’s time to rethink the industry’s pricing model: “When you’re getting paid piecework by the mile and the load, you’re incented to drive as much as you can. Are those the incentives we want for somebody who’s driving an 80,000 pound load 60 miles an hour?”

What do you think? Post a comment and share your perspective.

And with that, have a happy weekend!

Song of the Week: “Bleed Out” by Blue October



Note: Descartes is a Logistics Viewpoints sponsor.

Hours of Service: The “Obamacare” of the Trucking Industry?

Regulations | By •

The new Hours of Service regulations, which went into effect July 1, 2013, might well be the “Obamacare” of the trucking industry, with yet another challenge issued last Thursday when U.S. Reps. Richard Hanna (R-NY), Tom Rice (R-SC) and Mike Michaud (D-ME) introduced the TRUE Safety Act. The bill specifically targets the 34-hour restart rule, which is the most controversial part of the new HOS regulations, much like the individual mandate is for Obamacare. Here are some highlights of the TRUE Safety Act:

  • Truckers would abide by the 34-hour restart rules that were in place before July 1, 2013.
  • The Government Accountability Office (GAO) would be required to conduct an independent assessment of the methodology FMCSA used to come up with the new 34-hour restart rule.
  • The new 34-hour restart rule could not be re-implemented until six months after GAO submits its assessment to Congress.

According to Representative Rice, “Congress required the FMSCA to complete a comprehensive study before imposing new hours of service standards on our truckers. Instead, the agency has abused its authority and is requiring truckers to comply with one of the most stringent parts of its regulation prior to receiving their study’s findings. This legislation will rein in FMSCA and postpone the new un-tested hours of service regulation until its study is complete and require an additional study to ensure that our truckers are not being overregulated.”

Until recently, I hadn’t heard much from shippers, carriers, or 3PLs about any significant impact to operations resulting from the new rules. But that’s starting to change. Here are some comments issued in recent weeks by Schneider National and Werner Enterprises related to Hours of Service.

From a press release issued by Schneider National on October 24, 2013:

Since the new HOS implementation, Schneider has realized a 3.1 percent drop in productivity on solo shipments and a 4.3 percent decline on team shipments [emphasis mine]. The results are similar to Schneider’s forecasted 3–4 percent, which was based on predictive modeling and presented as testimony to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in February 2011.

 

“The Hours of Service changes could not have come at a worse time,” said Dave Geyer, senior vice president/general manager of Schneider’s Van Truckload division. “We now need more drivers to do the same amount of work, but regulations, economic conditions and demographics are working against us in terms of recruiting new drivers. Those who do answer the call deserve an attractive wage and good benefits, but we’re being restricted in the number of miles we can give them and the ongoing challenges that come with sharply rising operating costs.”

And from Werner Enterprises’ Q32013 financial results press release:

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (“FMCSA”) published final driver hours of service (“HOS”) rules in December 2011, which became effective July 1, 2013. Among the changes were more restrictive requirements covering driver use of the 34-hour restart rule and a new mandatory 30-minute rest period after 8 hours on duty. The Company modified and tested its electronic HOS system and began dispatching drivers under the revised HOS rules effective July 1. As expected, the Company believes that these hours of service changes negatively impacted miles per truck by two to three percent [emphasis mine].

I’m speaking tomorrow about Hours of Service at the CONECT 12th Annual Northeast Cargo Symposium, so I won’t steal any more of my thunder today. But here’s one of the key points I plan to communicate to the audience tomorrow: do not view Hours of Service as an isolated issue in the trucking industry; it’s just one factor, along with CSA, driver shortage, and others, that are coming together to create a capacity crunch “perfect storm,” similar to (or perhaps worse than) the one we experienced in 2004. The only missing factor is a strong growing economy, which is why we find ourselves today in the calm before the storm. What are you doing to prepare before the winds pick up and you’re caught in the storm path?

The Capacity Crunch Perfect Storm
The Capacity Crunch Perfect Storm

For related commentary, see What is the Future of Truckload Transportation?

Takeaways from Shipper-Carrier Roundtable at Momentum 2013

Transportation | By •

What happens when you bring together a large group of shippers and carriers and put them in a conference room? At the Manhattan Associates Momentum 2013 conference last month, the answer was a great conversation about transportation trends, challenges, and opportunities.

I had the privilege of moderating this year’s Shipper-Carrier Roundtable, which included the following executives from the industry:

  • Joshua Dolan, Senior Director, Transportation at Dick’s Sporting Goods
  • Arne Gonzales, Director, Supply Chain at C&S Wholesale Grocer
  • Brett Suma, Vice President of Operations at Knight Transportation
  • Dan Strong, CEO and President at Super Service LLC
  • Ron Lazo, Vice President of Transportation Practice at Manhattan Associates

Although I had prepared many questions to drive the conversation, we only got through about half of them because we received a lot of great questions and comments from the 100+ people in the audience. Summarizing a 75-minute conversation into a few words is impossible, but here are some of my key takeaways from the session:

  • You can’t have a shipper-carrier panel discussion without talking about rates, fuel, and capacity. Although these three factors are interrelated, the one that concerns shippers and carriers the most today is capacity — specifically, what will happen to capacity and carrier productivity when the new Hours of Service rules go into effect July 1, 2013 (barring any legal maneuvers), coupled with the impact CSA is having on driver hiring and retention? The big test will come in Q4 when shipping volumes increase for the holidays. Of course, a lot also depends on what happens with the economy in the months ahead too.

  • The ability for carriers to provide shippers with timely and accurate information is becoming a critical success factor. Simply put, a carrier’s IT capabilities matter. This is a key reason why non-asset based providers are attracting so much attention these days, especially from investors. As one panelist put it, many of these non-asset based providers are first and foremost technology companies, and they are outperforming asset-based carriers in this area. But as I wrote about in a recent blog posting, somebody has to own the trucks and other assets that make logistics — and the whole non-asset 3PL industry — possible. The bottom line to shippers: you need to partner with asset-based providers too, especially those that continue to invest in new equipment and technology.

  • A growing number of carriers are starting to scorecard their shipper clients, using solutions such as Manhattan Associates’ Profit Analyzer. Not all freight or shippers are created equal. Scorecarding helps carriers quantify the value of lanes and shippers, allowing them to make smarter business decisions about pricing and which lanes and shippers to keep and which ones to get rid of. Most carriers use scorecards for internal purposes only, but a few are starting to share their scorecards with shippers as a way to talk more openly about how they can work together more collaboratively.

My advice to shippers is the same as it’s been the past few years: stay focused on the long-term trends, which point to tighter trucking capacity and higher fuel costs, and look for cost-saving opportunities that make sense to implement regardless of market conditions (see here and here, for example).

While at the conference, I also attended a session about Manhattan’s Transportation Management solution and its new features and functions. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Manhattan redesigned the user interface to make the app more elegant and easier to use. The “Webtop” user interface uses tiles and portlets, and it has a similar “look and feel” to Windows 8. This is yet another example of how software vendors are starting to compete on design.

  • The solution can communicate short-term, lane-level forecasts to carriers. The idea is to give carriers a “heads up” about significant changes expected in shipment volumes on specific lanes, which would allow carriers to reposition equipment to support surges (or maximize their load acceptance rate) or seek alternative freight if volumes are expected to decrease. At the moment, the solution doesn’t generate the transportation forecast, it just communicates it to carriers in a template format, but Manhattan is looking to add this capability in the future. For additional insights on this topic, watch the recent episode of Talking Logistics, “Revisiting Transportation Forecasting.”

  • The solution supports the new Hours of Service rules that are expected to go into effect on July 1, including support for the newly mandated break and changes to the 34-hour reset rules. It also enables shippers to use Compliance, Safety and Accountability (CSA) scores to influence load assignments.

I also had a chance to sit down with Eddie Capel, Manhattan Associates’ President and CEO, to discuss a variety of topics, including the meaning and importance of Supply Chain Commerce; the roles social, mobile, cloud computing, and BI/analytics are playing in Manhattan’s strategy and product roadmap; Manhattan’s brand perception as a WMS company; his thoughts on business networks and trading partner connectivity; and the importance of talent acquisition and retention at the company. You can watch my conversation with Eddie below.

Note: Manhattan Associates is a Logistics Viewpoints sponsor.

Clock Ticking on Hours of Service (and Other Trucking Risks)

Regulations | By •

It’s been more than a year since the U.S. Department of Transportation announced its final rule on Hours of Service (HOS) (read my comments at the time in “Hours of Service Rules Changed, But the Big Picture in Trucking Stays the Same”). The compliance date of July 1, 2013 seemed so far away back then, but with January almost over, the deadline for compliance is just a few calendar pages away.

The table below summarizes the HOS changes, and if you want more detail, I recommend the “Interstate Truck Driver’s Guide to Hours of Service” published by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), which was updated this month.

Summary_2011_HOS_Final_Rule_Provisions

Legal challenges are underway, with oral arguments in American Trucking Associations, Inc. v. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration scheduled for March 15, 2013. According to a ATA filing, some of issues to be raised at the hearing include:

  • Whether the final rule’s restart provision, which requires that the restart include two periods between 1 a.m. to 5 a.m., should be held unlawful and set aside on the grounds that it is arbitrary and capricious, and contrary to law.
  • Whether the final rule’s limitation on the use of the restart to once every 168 hours should be held unlawful and set aside on the grounds that it is arbitrary and capricious, and contrary to law.
  • Whether the final rule’s break requirement should be held unlawful and set aside on the grounds that it is arbitrary and capricious, and contrary to law, because it requires that a mandated 30-minute break exclude all on-duty non- driving activity (if more than 8 consecutive hours have passed since the last off- duty or sleeper-berth period of at least half an hour).

So, what impact will the changes to the 34-hour restart rule and rest breaks have on supply chains if they are upheld? An amicus brief filed with the court by the National Association of Manufacturers, National Retail Federation (NRF), National Grocers Association (NGA), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and ten other trade associations highlights some of the ripple effects the changes will have on businesses, especially for industries that rely on night deliveries. Here are some excerpts from the brief [emphasis are mine]:

Many commenters noted that their industries rely on night deliveries from drivers who regularly work night schedules. Because of the two-night restriction, those drivers taking advantage of the restart will have two choices – either begin a new day in the morning after the second overnight period, or begin their workweek at their normal nightshift time. In either case, the overall off-duty time for those drivers could be significantly more than 34 hours – in some cases over 60 hours.

 

This reduction in available workweek hours will force companies to hire additional drivers and add equipment. Some drivers will start work early in the morning – as opposed to making their deliveries at night as preferred by the shippers and receivers – adding trucks on the road at peak times, and leading to increased congestion and longer delivery lead times.

 

The NRF’s comments showed that a number of its members routinely dispatch drivers prior to 5:00 a.m. so that deliveries can be made before traffic is congested and arrive before stores open…IFDA [International Foodservice Distributors Association] noted that many in that industry have moved to additional nighttime operations as customers accept “key drops,” i.e., deliveries made at night when a restaurant is not open…NGA noted that these changes would disproportionately impact its members…Grocery stores rely on deliveries early in the morning, especially for perishable goods that have a limited shelf life and must be on the shelves when stores open. With the changes to the rule, lead times for perishable goods will increase, leading wholesalers to increase inventory levels to maintain service. All of these changes would lead to increased costs throughout the supply chain.

Will the proposed changes to the HOS rules get upheld or overturned? Your guess is as good as mine. But regardless of what happens with HOS, transportation executives have other trucking-related risks to manage too, such as tightening capacity and increasing driver turnover. According to U.S. Census data from 2007 and 2010, the number of firms in “General freight trucking” declined about 9 percent during that period. And although the rate of trucking bankruptcies has declined from its peak in 2009, carriers are not adding capacity to make up the loss, so there is less trucking capacity available today than just a few years ago.

On the driver side, the ATA reported last month that “the annualized linehaul driver turnover rate at large truckload fleets remained over 100% for the second straight quarter, and the churn at smaller truckload carriers rose to a five-year high.” According to ATA Chief Economist Bob Costello:

“Increasing competition for quality drivers, coupled with gradual, albeit choppy, growth in demand for trucking services, continues to put pressure on the driver market”

 

“These numbers continue to reflect a tight driver market, and an actual shortage for drivers. We believe the industry is actually short between 20,000 and 25,000 drivers, but if freight volumes were to accelerate, I would expect that number to grow and grow rapidly.”

Articles published last year in USA Today and The Huffington Post highlight the challenges trucking companies are having hiring drivers, even in the bad economy.

The bottom line: there is no shortage of risks and uncertainties in the trucking industry, which is why many shippers have been moving away from one-way truck freight and shifting more volume to intermodal and dedicated fleets as a way to “take freight off the truckload grid,” as one shipper put it to me a couple of years ago. Shippers are also exploring ways to increase capacity utilization, such as collaborative shipping and rethinking their packaging design and materials to fit more products per case, more cases per pallet, and more pallets per trailer (resulting in fewer shipments required).

Yes, the clock is ticking on all sorts of trucking risks, so buckle up and get ready for some bumpy and windy roads ahead.

Guest Commentary: Transportation Compliance Doesn’t Cost, It Pays

Guest Commentary | By •

Traditional thinking is that government transportation compliance programs, such as hours of service (HOS) regulations, cost companies money. If the focus of your compliance efforts is solely to meet the regulation, then I concur. But, that approach is a lost opportunity to reduce operational costs through better driver and vehicle performance. Instead of just meeting the regulations, fleet operators need to look beyond to the benefits of telematics and advanced tracking systems to change driver behavior, improve productivity, better understand vehicle performance and, for a large number of goods shipped, ensure that they arrive at their destination without damage. With the technology available today, the price difference between solutions that cost money to be compliant and solutions that help you make money through improved performance are only dollars per month.

Complying with government mandates such as HOS means that your drivers are not working the kind of hours that make them a hazard to the other drivers on the road. What HOS doesn’t tell you is, when your drivers were driving, were they as productive as possible? Did they excessively abuse your vehicles or the products they are carrying? This is where the money is to more than offset the cost of compliance.

Any fleet manager would say that they have good drivers and bad drivers, and that the good drivers are the most productive. Any competent fleet manager would also say that they have put together training programs and best practices to raise the level of their poorer performers. These same fleet managers would say that this approach does improve driver performance, but seldom reaches its full potential and is tough to sustain across their organization.

Why? Because it is nearly impossible to measure driver performance over the road without remote tracking and vehicle monitoring capabilities. Drivers know this and, while most are well intended, they do what they believe is best to get the job done.

A simple example is leaving the vehicle running while they are stopped for a pick-up or delivery or filling out paper work. It doesn’t take a lot of idling to run up large and unnecessary fuel cost, especially in these high fuel cost times. Regulations, such as the engine idling rule in New York City that aggressively fine fleet operators if they are caught idling over 3 minutes, further drive idling costs. Add to that the costs of reduced customer service associated with miles and operating hours of drivers driving off route or making unplanned stops.

Driver behavior also impacts vehicle maintenance costs. Excessive tire, brake and engine wear are related to speeding, hard cornering and braking, engine over-revving, etc. – and all are a function of driver performance.

For a number of sensitive products, driver behavior impacts the quality of those products. Take a product such as ice cream – it is easy to understand how leaving the door open too long at each stop results in thawing and freezing that ruins the product. What is harder to understand and track is how harsh driving can lead to failure rates in large screen televisions to abnormally climb. For “high dollar density” goods, such as televisions, a trailer of product represents millions of dollars in potential damage claims.

There has been considerable change within the technology markets associated with fleet management within the last several years. In the past, telematics solutions were cumbersome and extremely expensive to purchase and operate. Class-focused compliance solutions emerged that were much lower cost, but offered limited or no capabilities for tracing driver and vehicle performance and making corrective actions. Now, there are cost-effective solutions that combine the ability to connect to the vehicle’s bus and provide compliance reporting. In addition, there is integration with route planning and execution to help ensure that even if drivers are exhibiting good driving behavior, they are actually running the routes that are lowest cost and meet their pick-up and delivery windows.

Fleet managers must recognize the inflection point that is in front of them. Transportation compliance programs, such as hours of service, driver logs and vehicle inspection, have been the great awakening for telematics and tracking technology. Unfortunately, many fleet managers are failing to capitalize on the opportunity to improve their productivity by implementing solutions that only meet their compliance requirements. These are the solutions that “cost.” The advanced planning, mobile and telematics solutions available now meet the compliance requirements but also provide the driver and vehicle performance management capabilities that help change driver productivity, performance and safety. These are the solutions that “pay.”

Chris Jones is the Executive Vice President for Marketing and Services at Descartes. He has over 20 years of experience in the supply chain market, holding variety of senior management positions including: Senior Vice President at The Aberdeen Group’s Value Chain Research division, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Development for SynQuest and Vice President and Research Director for Enterprise Resource Planning Solutions at The Gartner Group.

Transportation Regulatory Trends

Regulations | By •

Over the past few weeks I’ve attend TMC’s Interactive Client Forum and Descartes’ Evolution 2011 User Conference (TMC and Descartes are ARC clients). At both conferences, there were speakers focused on regulatory trends in transportation. The Descartes conference featured Annette Sandberg, a former Administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). TMC’s conference featured Angie Freeman, C.H. Robinson’s VP of Investor Relations and Public Affairs (TMC is the transportation managed services division of C.H. Robinson Worldwide).

“Hopefully everyone’s had their coffee because I’m going to speak about regulatory issues,” Annette joked at the beginning of her speech. But I found her speech, and Angie’s, interesting and insightful. What I particularly valued is that both speakers – two very smart women – did not just report on where regulations stood, but gave their informed opinion on where things are likely to go.

Here are my four main takeaways from the two speeches:

1. Since we are going into an election year, the pace of regulation will slow down because agencies don’t want to create any controversy. Deadlines have already slipped for several pending rules, and many will slip further.

2. There has been a lot of focus on Hours of Service (HOS). Of all the pending transportation regulations, HOS is the least likely to happen. The Obama administration has admitted that it is one of the most expensive rules pending across all US government agencies. Further, once the rulemaking process is finalized, it is susceptible to a successful court appeal because the FMCSA changed the way it conducted its required cost/benefit analysis for this regulation.

3. If you go to the site where the Carrier Safety Measurement Safety (SMS) data is displayed, there is a disclosure that states “Readers should not draw conclusions about a carrier’s overall safety condition simply based on the data displayed in this system.” Many shippers believe that this disclosure helps protect them from litigation if they use a carrier with marginal or unfit ratings that ends up in a crash. But they are mistaken. Motor carriers are only mandated to carry at least $750,000 in insurance. If there is a crash that causes multiple fatalities, $750,000 does not go very far. Lawyers will go after shippers and brokers with deeper pockets.

So what should a shipper do? Have a policy framework in place and follow it consistently. That policy should include checking SMS scores of your carriers frequently (there are software solutions that have proactive alerts for this). The policy should also set standards for which carriers can and can’t be used based on their scores. One key piece of advice: don’t make this policy too restrictive. In case of a lawsuit, it is worse to have a policy in place and not follow it then not to have a policy at all. So before deciding what sort of policy to implement, shippers are advised to do a simulation and see how many carriers would fall out of their routing guide based on a particular driver scoring threshold. But also realize that using carriers with overall ratings of “Unfit” or “Marginal” could be dangerous.

4.  Electronic On-Board Recorders (EOBRs) are being proposed as a way to replace paper documentation to show compliance to HOS. While the mobility revolution is driving down the cost of GPS-enabled mobile devices, EOBRs are actually pretty expensive – a $1,000-$4,000 purchase price – based on the requirement that law enforcement officials must be able to plug into the device to download data. Despite the expense, there will likely be an industry-wide EOBR mandate within the next 5 years.

The FMCSA, as part of its ongoing responsibilities, audits carriers and asks them if they use GPS to track their trucks. If a carrier says yes, they compare the GPS data to the paper logs. Between 30 and 70 percent of the time the entries don’t match. As a result, a carrier’s rating can move from satisfactory to conditional and the carrier can lose business. In short, there are good reasons for a carrier to use an EOBR even if it is not required.

Whenever regulations are discussed, carriers and shippers assume that transportation costs will rise. But transportation costs are far more correlated with the price of fuel than anything else. In fact, there is a graph in Morgan Stanley’s June 2011 freight transportation report that shows drivers have lost ground during this economic downturn as compared to an index of the Wages & Salaries of Private Industry Workers and the Consumer Price Index. As of now, there is no real proof of a driver shortage because if there was a shortage, driver wages would be rising.

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