Automotive asks for its own punishment.
Inventory is kept so tight that a missing part does not slow a plant down. It stops it. Picture fifteen hundred people in a parking lot smoking cigarettes because one bolt that goes on the back of the chassis did not show up.
That is why a late load costs the carrier ten thousand dollars an hour, when the delay is the carrier's fault.
Late October 2001, the week of Halloween. A full load of parts for the Chrysler plant in Brampton. Pickup in Detroit, nine hours of margin, which is comfortable.
Then the weather came early, the way it does maybe once a decade here, and nobody had switched to winter tires yet.
A truck rolled over on the 401 and the eastbound lanes closed. Not for an hour. For nine and a half. There was a spill, so the Ministry of the Environment was involved, and nothing moved until they said so.
Our truck was sitting in it. The load was going to be eleven hours late.
The part that matters
It was not our fault. Not even slightly. We could have written it up as an act of God, told them the highway was closed and we would call when it opened, and gone home.
Eleven hours at ten thousand an hour is a hundred and ten thousand dollars, and none of it was ever going to land on us. We had a clean way out.
We did not take it.
There is no loading dock on the shoulder of a highway. Without a tailgate you are not transferring anything, at any price.
So here was the requirement. Twenty-four foot straight trucks. Tandem, two axles on the back, because a single axle handles automotive freight fine right up until the freight is heavy, and this was heavy. A tailgate on each one, rated to take that weight, which is not the same as rated for freight.
Two of them
If you have never tried to source that on no notice, in bad weather, at the wrong end of the day, it is not like calling a taxi. One is a good day. Everything close was committed. So the whole desk got on the phones, calling people who had no reason to help us, asking for favours anyway.
We got two.
Police pulled our trailer over on the shoulder. We transferred a full load of automotive parts at the side of the 401, in the weather, with a portable forklift and a pallet jack, and sent both trucks on.
One hour and twenty minutes late instead of eleven. Brampton did not go down.
It was my idea to send the straight trucks. I will take that one. But it took the whole desk, and any dispatcher who has lived a day like that knows the idea is the cheap part.
They had been a good customer for years. It would not have mattered if they had started with us yesterday. That is the commitment you make when you sit down at that desk and put the headset on.
At the time we did not think of it as anything. We called it another day in trucking, high-fived, and laughed about it.
Thirty-five years later, it is still what I would want someone to know about how I run an operation.