In years past, shippers did whatever they wanted, yet could always find a carrier. But now transportation is often very difficult. We understand we need to develop collaborative relationships with our carriers.
The problems are with the smaller carriers, which SYSCO relies on heavily. Small carriers don't have a lot of this information readily available. We ask them to enter the data in our Internet-based transportation management system, but they're not always good about doing it.
Carriers that do enough business with us could drop a full trailer, pick up one of their empty trailers, and go. They don't even have to wait two hours; they can do it in 15 minutes.
Some of these companies do a great job, while others have a different attitude.
Even with the capacity imbalance, carriers are still going out of business.
