Webinar: Planning, collaboration will relieve supply chain pressures

A panel of experts discussed potential solutions for truck delays at marine terminals.    There are many factors contributing to congestion at several major ports, but the main takeaway from an American Shipper webinar on Tuesday was that parties in the supply chain can relieve some of the delays through better planning and collaboration.
   A panel of experts from the marine terminal, retailing, trucking and chassis-leasing industries convened on a virtual platform to discuss the situation at ports in Southern California, New York/New Jersey, Virginia and Oakland.
   Nearly 700 people registered to hear potential solutions to make container yards more fluid and save shippers from having their cargo stuck inside terminal gates for up to a week or more. The ongoing problems come at the same time retailers are focused on getting products to stores for the holiday shopping season.
   Industry officials trace the backlogs to the arrival of bigger ships that are discharging more cargo at once and new alliances that have carriers switching to different terminals within a port week to week, without clear communication to importers.
   But Ed DeNike, the president of SSA Containers, primarily blamed the problem on a severe shortage of chassis in Southern California, which makes it difficult to move containers off property.
   Stan Portlock, a vice president for chassis provider Flexi-Van, provided more details on the “pool of pool” concept being developed along with DCLI to make chassis interchanges among truckers easier in the Los Angeles/Long Beach port district.
   Reade Kidde, director of international logistics for The Home Depot, said shippers and transportation service providers should forecast demand and collaboratively plan for future volumes to ensure enough resources are in place.
   He and Curtis Whalen, executive director of the Intermodal Carrier Conference at the American Trucking Associations, said a better system for measuring truck delays at the gate is needed. Terminals and port authorities often define and measure turn times using different metrics that don’t factor in the queue time waiting to get to the gate. Whalen said a common language is needed as a baseline for discussions to fix the system.
   The event was sponsored by the Coalition for Responsible Transportation.
   A recording of the port congestion webinar is available for download.