The Supply Chains headaches. Show me yours; I show you mine.

I have been in business since 1997. I have built and managed manufacturing, retail, e-commerce and software development businesses. All my ventures had to communicate with different logistics service providers from time to time. I have experience with abysmal service, average service and exceptional service. In most of these cases, there are only two key factors, communication and giving a f___ about the customer. And suppose the second point is about leadership and the culture inside the company. In that case, communication is mostly about connectivity, traceability and accuracy of information flow. In other words, it’s mainly about the data and the level of trust we have in it. Let me ask you, on a scale from 0 to 100, how much do you trust your logistics partner?

This post is to invite you into a discussion about the failures of different LSPs (logistics service providers) without bringing out their names, without going personal. I want to start a conversation with you since, in the nearest future, we, with the Supplain team, will put together an international event and invite all parties of the supply chains, LSPs and their global customers. A few weeks ago, we organised the largest WEB3 event in Nordics, NFT_Tallinn. This was a huge success. We learned from that a lot. We decided to organise the largest Supply Chain conference in Europe this time. But for this event to be a success, we first need to collect as many problems and issues that most of you have with the current state of things.

To kick off this discussion, let me start with one of my latest cases when my shipping partner had failed my company big time! As usual, we used the booking platform of this Very Big and Important European 3PL company. (We agreed, no names, right?)

Step 1. I personally booked the shipping from the Denmark warehouse to Estonia to my customer’s front door. After booking, I received a confirmation that my order was accepted.

Step 2. Goods were not collected on time, but the system showed me that they were “In transit” for ten days till I called the person in charge of this lane and asked about the delivery. This person said that the reference number wasn’t correct and thus they never collected the goods. (I received no notification about this accident that I would otherwise solve in 2 minutes.) All this time, their system showed the shipment status as “In transit”. Do you actually know what it means?!

Step 3. After I finally re-confirmed the reference number, the goods were collected and arrived in Estonia three days later. The order was door2door, and the date and procedure of the last mile delivery were agreed upon. The driver had to be informed to connect a person in charge of unloading an hour in advance. It looks like a walk in the park, right? Actually, not.

Step 4. The next day was the day of agreed delivery. I was busy with different stuff and was contacted by my customer by late afternoon. She informed me about the missing furniture. The good didn’t arrive. I had to call again to the last mile delivery department. I learned that the goods didn’t fit into the truck, and we planned for the next day’s delivery. Try to guess, would I be informed if I wouldn’t call them? Of course not! There were no messages or notifications sent to me to keep my face in front of my customer.

Step 5. On the next day, the newly agreed arrival date, my employee had been waiting for a call from a driver since 10 am. The driver never called. By 15.00, I called again to the last mile delivery department of this Very Famous International Logistics firm with the Huge Market Share. This time, the guy seemed to have a computer with him. At least, he said that according to the map (they apparently have a live map of their vehicles!), the truck is somewhere around my customer’s home address. The driver never called, but he went directly to the address and engaged with the unknown person (a construction worker accidentally hanging around at the moment of the truck’s arrival). So the driver passed an expensive piece of furniture to the random guy and collected a signature from a random stranger.

Step 6. An automated invoice dropped into my email box, letting me know they “have done their job”.

I wonder if they are actually proud of what they do daily? On this company’s website, there is a mission statement that sounds so generic and empty that I decided to skip it. But there are five bullet points presented (with some minor grammar mistakes like they seem to be so focuSSed on meeting and exceeding my needs, Should I re-evaluate myself, how come I never felt it?):

“Our five strategic aims which will ensure we deliver customer excellence are:

• Provide a competitive, cost-effective and diverse range of services.
• Ensure total quality in everything we do.
• Demonstrate reliability in everything we deliver.
• Remain flexible but focused on meeting and exceeding our customer needs.
• All our services need to be as fast as possible without compromising customer expectations.”

Needless to say that I never got a “sorry note” or any explanation from this Very Important Company. I don’t expect it.

What can we learn from here? At least three of these steps could save the day if automated since we deal with data. If those data points were interconnected and if there would be a proper application running on this interconnected protocol, I would know where my goods are or at least I would be notified if there would be a problem of some kind. It’s clear that we cannot change the person’s attitude who does not care about the user experience because they have no skin in the game. There are most probably some organisational cultural, and management issues in this firm. Or maybe it was just someone’s bad day.

Or would they call it a “seamless delivery”? Since it seemed to them that it was delivered without any problems. “He never learned what hit him.”

Feel free to share your stories with us and become the members of our community of “World of Freight”, where the Freight Friends meet to build new and better tools for the supply chain.

If you want to discuss it, email me at alex[at]supplain.io