XPO | Contenting Freight

[Night Tripper]

Anyone notice, that when a customers freight is contented ( Analyzed). That customer seems to disappear from Conway. Does it make any sense to lose customers in an already soft market, or cut them some slack until the market turns around. Just wondering, but, I'm not the one making the decisions, just the guy that is seeing what is happening.

 

[icuicp]

We don't have that problem so much at my location. What's wrong here is what we content(check). We check the same freight over and over,which is a complete waste of time. If Acme Inc. makes big plastic boxes and ships big plastic boxes and you check it on Monday and it's a big box, and on Tuesday it's a big box, why is a guy checking it everyday if that's all that a company produces. I wish we could use common sense to quit wasting time.

 

[free_thinker]

mikke, I believe that a vast majority of the freight inspected by Con-Tent is the same stuff, over and over.

One would think that, if a customer is shipping the same items all the time, as you describe, that the customer would finally grasp the correct classification of their product; and thereby eliminate the need for Con-Tent to look at it, but no, they often do not.

As you say, if the only thing Acme Inc. makes is Big Plastic Boxes....they've only got to know at least one, (maybe a handful) of NMFC classification numbers---but no, they continue to use the wrong ones; thus they become a target for the Inspectors.

That, or the CSR's at origin get it billed wrong---or, it could be a little of both.

It's not a waste of time though to inspect the same stuff day after day, if much of the time it results in a correction.

And keep in mind, just because it's the same stuff getting looked at every day----that can also mean that one day it'll result in revenue one day and the next it won't. For instance, if Acme ships their product to one customer PrePaid, and another collect, one might result in revenue for Con-Way and one might not.

The bottom line is this; that ideally the Inspector's job is to make sure the freight is properly classified. Whether or not the revenue changes is immaterial. Inspectors do not set pricing, they merely try to implement accuracy. If customers don't like what they're paying to ship their product, they have their A/E to talk to about it, and as we all know, they often do.

I've heard of many instances where, after continually having their shipments corrected, customers have gotten their A/E to implement pricing that effectively negates any future corrections on the same commodity.

No one likes to waste time.

Be it drivers sitting at a meet-n-turn waiting on their counterpart to arrive, and probably not an inspector who goes to the trouble of measuring/opening/photographing a shipment only to find the item is correctly classified.

I suspect if an Inspector is taking the time to look at something, there has been historically a reason to check that commodity again.

 

[icuicp]

Another problem we have at our location is the lack of freight classification knowledge by the AE/salespeople. Their lack of knowledge leads to misinforming the customer which leads to a money loosing deals for Con-way which leads to content inspectors and rate adjustments. This could be fixed if the AE/salespeople are required to have the exact same training as the content inspectors and for 1 week out of every year do content inspections at their home terminal.:snaggletooth:

 

[ccxnobody]

We don't have that problem so much at my location. What's wrong here is what we content(check). We check the same freight over and over,which is a complete waste of time. If Acme Inc. makes big plastic boxes and ships big plastic boxes and you check it on Monday and it's a big box, and on Tuesday it's a big box, why is a guy checking it everyday if that's all that a company produces. I wish we could use common sense to quit wasting time.

So they dont lose your customers so they can pay for that ceo guy (wont even dignify the name) to move back to MI...