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J.B. Hunt executive pushes ‘network of networks’ to end supply chain disconnects

Frazier tells F3 audience supply chains remain too siloed and fragmented despite billions spent to link them

Spencer Frazier of J.B. Hunt keynotes the first day of F3Industry Keynote (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)

Supply chain practitioners need to step up their efforts to develop connected ecosystems if they want to remove stubborn waste and inefficiencies from their networks, one of J.B. Hunt Transport Services’ top executives said Tuesday.

Keynoting FreightWaves’ F3: Future of Freight Festival in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Spencer Frazier, J.B. Hunt’s executive vice president of sales and marketing, said that many supply chains remain fragmented, siloed and disconnected in terms of product and data flows. This comes despite stakeholders’’ making herculean efforts, and spending billions of dollars, in an effort to change the status quo.

“The disconnects still remain,” Frazier said.

The industry’s standard response to extreme operational variability and volatility has been to throw more money at the problem, Frazier said. However, much of those expenditures just result in higher costs, such as building high inventory levels as delivery buffers, without getting at the root cause.


A poster child for this lack of progress is in the area of commercial truck drivers’ hours of service, Frazier said. A 2015 Hunt white paper found that drivers spent 6.65 hours of their allowed 11-hour daily drive times on the road. A similar study conducted earlier this year found that the percentage of actual driving hours had barely budged from seven years prior.

There are common challenges that drivers face as they seek to balance their work and home lives, Frazier said. These include scheduling flexibility, consistent access to loads and safe, available parking facilities. “We need to treat drivers’ hours as if they are a perishable commodity,” Frazier said, repeating a long-held mantra of Lowell, Arkansas-based J.B. Hunt (NASDAQ: JBHT).

One holistic solution, which Hunt will be publicly elaborating upon in the next few weeks, is to build a connected ecosystem that Frazier described as a “network of networks.” The objective is to build end-to-end connectivity in real time, supported by new scheduling standards and more robust demand forecasting capabilities. The endgame is to shrink operational variability, improve customer service and take out millions of dollars in costs.

Today, J.B. Hunt and other providers offer customer-specific solutions that address and resolve challenges in different parts of the supply chain. These solution sets must be broadened, Frazier said.


“We can connect with each other across every platform,” Frazier said in a high-level teaser for what the company is expected to announce. He did not provide details.

One Comment

  1. Steve M

    Unfortunately, JB Hunt’s brokerage apparently does not listen to Mr. Frazier as they devalue drivers time more than any other broker in the market based on their spot rates.

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Mark Solomon

Formerly the Executive Editor at DC Velocity, Mark Solomon joined FreightWaves as Managing Editor of Freight Markets. Solomon began his journalistic career in 1982 at Traffic World magazine, ran his own public relations firm (Media Based Solutions) from 1994 to 2008, and has been at DC Velocity since then. Over the course of his career, Solomon has covered nearly the whole gamut of the transportation and logistics industry, including trucking, railroads, maritime, 3PLs, and regulatory issues. Solomon witnessed and narrated the rise of Amazon and XPO Logistics and the shift of the U.S. Postal Service from a mail-focused service to parcel, as well as the exponential, e-commerce-driven growth of warehouse square footage and omnichannel fulfillment.