How is the Lack of Trucking Availability Affecting Timber Shipments

As a part of the logistics industry where you have to depend on the transportation of goods, in recent times, you have surely experienced the prevalence of freight shipment delays that has become widespread over the past year. To think of it, several factors determine the current tension found in the transportation market, especially because it affects the supply chain, and that includes truck drivers who are available, the weather having a ripple effect, the increase seen in consumer demand, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

How is Government Stimulus an Extraordinary Event that Creates Freight Demand

Along with the fact that 2020-2021 has been a year filled with unpredictable events, the truck market of today’s time is about to receive additional freight from around three stimulus packages. While the amount of freight isn’t clear yet, the models are working to involve government, commercial, and consumer spending.

Demand growth, for instance, doesn’t have the same constraint as that of supply because the latter cannot grow at the same level based on structural limitations. Given this situation, the order backlog of the brand-new truck supply is increasing and will only be delivered somewhere in the middle of 2022.

The Current Condition of Trucking Market

Since the onset of 2020, the North American surface transportation marketplace has been oversupplied. The unintended result of COVID-19 on the federal relief funds and other issues due to the health concerns of the pandemic has ultimately resulted in the reduction of around 94,600 trucking jobs, as per BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Some other factors that contribute to the present state of the trucking labour market include (but is not limited to):

1. The US is still down -3% on trucking jobs from February 2020 to February 2021.
2. LTL experiencing around 2.2% employment shortage, as compared to what January 2020 had seen.
3. The key driver demographic remains in a divergent course where a rise in retirement is seen through 2025. There will be a decline in 21-year-olds all through 2023 as well.

Given the current situation and what statistics suggest, the market is expected to see an upward continued pressure on the driver compensation and bonuses needed to hold on to the expanding fleet. As an exporter, however, to keep your business supply chain from malfunctioning, you can fall back on a supply chain automation platform like Timber Exchange.

Timber Exchange is a cloud based enterprise solution for supply chain management that has been developed to address several blind spots that we are currently seeing in global trade and logistics. By complementing existing solutions, we remove trade barriers and bring transparency and automation to companies engaged in global trade.

You can also keep track of the platform to check live container tracking to see where the delays are occurring and why. The fact that you can check how every freight forwarder is performing in real-time ensures that you choose what’s best for your business deliverables, especially when you are a part of the Sweden forestry industry. Contact https://www.centersource.io/ for more information from experts.

Managing Supply Chain Blind-Spots

The importance of effective logistics management is well known in industries all over the world. Production and production-related processes are often highly effective with a high level of automation. Even though there is a high level of automation in production, the level of automation in administration of sales and external logistics is low in general. Many businesses are struggling with the heavy and complex administrative burden that comes with international shipments and therefore discouraged to expand to new markets. Logistics regarding information is often neglected and focus is typically found on the flows of goods, however, effective logistics can never be the ultimate goals in business and that is where supply chain management (SCM) complements logistics management.

SCM is a concept that has a well-defined customer focus, which must be the drive of all change within a company and outside a company to create interorganizational synergies. It is, after all, the end-customer that is paying for the final product and therefore also for all the upstream activities in a supply chain. Logistics management is the part of SCM that is concerned with the coordination, integration and management of flows of goods and information within one organization, whereas SCM is concerned with the management and coordination of organizations (within a supply chain).

Logistics management has come a long way and is well developed within its definition. SCM is however more complex and has not been around to be developed for so long, but effort is being made and the concept is getting established. One area in particular in global trade (and therefore a matter of SCM) is managed very primitively even to this day, which is from business inquiry and when the products leave the factory, until the products arrive at their destination. A surprisingly high number of top market players rely on shared folders, excel sheets, email, telephone and manual drafting of documents when it comes to administration of sales and cross-border logistics. There is no shared workspace or system for trade partners to facilitate and automate time consuming activities and communication between them, even though they do play in the same team from a SCM point of view.

The Centersource B2B collaboration platform was built by industry professionals who have experience from international trade and logistics and therefore also have been struggling with the supply chain blind-spots from business inquiry until when the goods are delivered at destination. The initial vision of everyone involved was to build one platform to gather and facilitate all activities between trade partners; procurement, sales, the logistics management, all administrative tasks, communication, tasks management, analysis, relevant statistics – everything concerned with global trade and logistics in a shared, fail-safe and intuitive workspace.

Centersource Technologies 

Website: https://www.centersource.io/   

Phone: +46855765992