Shipper says industry need to be less selfish
Stakeholders in the goods movement industry need to take a global view of port congestion and supply chain efficiency, rather than focusing solely on the bottom lines of their individual companies, said Inga Kerutis, manager of international carrier relations for JCPenney
Speaking Tuesday at the Port of Long Beach's Pulse of the Ports breakfast, Kerutis called on the industry to adopt a more selfless attitude toward peak season congestion.
'Ask not what your ports can do for you, but what you can do for your ports,' she said at the peak season forecast conference. 'We have all been selfish, looking at our own costs and service. We need to ask how we can accomplish company goals and also benefit the ports, because if they run smoother then we get better service. We're completely interdependent on each other. We have to step out of our silos and look at the impact our decisions have downstream.'
As an example, Kerutis cited the arrival patterns of containerships into the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles as having a deleterious effect on port infrastructure. Ship arrivals tend to bunch around the end of the week and on weekends, leaving the ports underutilized midweek and strained Thursday through Sunday.
'That makes for an extremely unproductive environment, and it's not unusual for distribution centers to get hit and have to dig themselves out of it the rest of the week,' she said.
Kerutis said it's incumbent on shippers to try to influence carriers to rearrange vessel sailing schedules so that arrivals are spaced out more evenly throughout the week, freeing up capacity on railroads and in marine terminals.
'It's not that shipping lines want weekend arrivals,' said Peter Leng, president of OOCL (USA), at the conference. 'It's a supply/demand issue and we are the ones most affected by supply and demand. But it sounds like there's a pain point on the consignee side, while the shippers aren't always willing to handle it.'
Shipper says industry need to be less selfish
