Central Transport | lost cause

[had enough]

this company as a whole future does'nt look good. between the lowballing of freight, the excessive tow and service call bills, the os&d claims, the poor routing and dispatching, the accts going by the waste side, the excessive o.t., the poor csa rating, the hazmat issue in toledo and now the dot investigation. this place can't survive that much longer before vitran canada has enough and shuts down the u.s. operations or just folds completely. i just don't see where chris can turn this around, he was hired too late to breathe life back in this company.

 

[runawaytrain]

Now thats Good and so true...Too little too late..Most of the problem is Vitran in Canada knew nothing about how the US worked...They thought they could come down and throw a little money around and they would succeed..The problem was they had no history in the US and they didnt understand you are only as good as the people you have working for you...All the other US LTL companies have had Dispatchers and managers in place that have been there 20 and 30 years....They had time to master there craft...To fine tune and tweat as needed..They had history...Vitran didnt keep enough of the long term people that knew this business...They put a bunch of yahoo's in charge that had no system...no structure...And now all they hire is people with almost no LTL experience in management...Dispatchers with very little LTL structure...And people that work for a cheap salary...well guess what? you get what you pay for...Hiring mistakes of some managers have almost certainly destroyed this companies ability to compete...

 

[Buckeyedriver7]

The haz-mat issue in Toledo was minor by comparison to what's going on in the company. The reason they found out about the haz-mat is because Steve fired a driver that he didn't get along with so he turned them in. This driver and Steve were constantly bucking heads. I can't speak for the city, but I hear of all the problems on the P&D side.

The biggest problem us line-haul drivers see is the use of 2 line-haul dispatch centers. You have Chuck in Indy setting up the loads only for Pittsburgh changing things during the night. Michigan & Ohio drivers report to Indy until they cross the PA line then report to Pittsburgh. It's a every night occurrence that drivers do meets and wait for 2-5 hours for their meet driver to show up. This is inexcusable. Supervisors are always complaining about having 2 dispatch centers.

 

[simple723]

I think we have a chance of survival, but not a complete turn around. The biggest problem I see is P&D, there is alot of money being sucked down into that system and no success. That is one shift where I see the most management, drivers, etc. There is no way possible you should be behind on a Monday morning at any terminal but these people can fail at making a peanut & jelly sandwich. I think linehaul is the only thing keeping us going even though the freight gets damaged most of the time on linehaul. Vitran grew to fast within the last 6 years. I believe they need to downsize in order to see where the real problem is. The method of using more supervisors is not working. Maybe they should bring back profit sharing. I remember when Vitran had that employees who brought company stock cared about the freight claims and equipment. Even though when Vitran got things rolling kind of good they brought the shares back & within a few months the shares doubled. Still mad about that but if I was the canadians I would have done it too.

 

[Not_wanted]

The haz-mat issue in Toledo was minor by comparison to what's going on in the company. The reason they found out about the haz-mat is because Steve fired a driver that he didn't get along with so he turned them in. This driver and Steve were constantly bucking heads. I can't speak for the city, but I hear of all the problems on the P&D side.

And you think that is the only terminal with one of them "hidden trailers" other terminals have them too, no one took charge and disposed of that freight over time, now it fills a pup or van, it's just our terminal does not have one of those leaking trailers