OMG I am IMPRESSED
- Thread starter Fr8 Shaker
- Start date
Falligator
Expert Expediter
Just tried the new internet board position and not bad...at least they're trying to head in the right direction. Problem is, I wasn't offered an empty move and it showed that I was 1 on the Portageville, MO board and I am 52 miles from Portageville. Probably going to take a vacation since I've been rakeing in the miles
since Sunday. Been getting loads as follows:
Sunday
699 miles from Cleveland, OH to Manchester, NH
Monday
had a 1261 Mile load from Round Pond, ME to Rockford, Ill, but the customer called said that the load needed to be delivered direct after Panther had already given me the time to run the load. So much for getting all the miles....ended up with 628 and got switched in Tonowanda, NY. Dh towards home on Tuesday and p/u a load enroute to house
Tuesday
593 miles Perry, OH to Green Bay, WI. Man it was cold up there.
Wednesday
641 miles from Schofield, WI to Poplar Bluff, MO. Finally, had over 2000 mile week. aprx 2,561 miles. No complaining here. just that I am tired and I'll talk to everyone later. Nighty Night!
since Sunday. Been getting loads as follows:
Sunday
699 miles from Cleveland, OH to Manchester, NH
Monday
had a 1261 Mile load from Round Pond, ME to Rockford, Ill, but the customer called said that the load needed to be delivered direct after Panther had already given me the time to run the load. So much for getting all the miles....ended up with 628 and got switched in Tonowanda, NY. Dh towards home on Tuesday and p/u a load enroute to house
Tuesday
593 miles Perry, OH to Green Bay, WI. Man it was cold up there.
Wednesday
641 miles from Schofield, WI to Poplar Bluff, MO. Finally, had over 2000 mile week. aprx 2,561 miles. No complaining here. just that I am tired and I'll talk to everyone later. Nighty Night!
hondaking38
Veteran Expediter
was in charleston over the weekend not a board anymore its morgantown, when i got a load to chicago from there..it showed 6 loads a day if u r sitting at the flying j in blacksburg you are not on the board.....any longer
pelicn
Veteran Expediter
The problem is that we are seeing these changes as they happen so it's confusing. Wouldn't it be nice if Panther had the luxury of getting all these changes in place, then rolling out the new system? No one likes sitting, but it does appear that Panther is trying to improve the system.
Maybe we should have a little patience, pause and take a breath. Of the boards that have "disappeared", has it changed your board position? What I mean is, does it matter if it says X city or Y city, if nothing else has changed? You would still be showing on that board.
Maybe we should have a little patience, pause and take a breath. Of the boards that have "disappeared", has it changed your board position? What I mean is, does it matter if it says X city or Y city, if nothing else has changed? You would still be showing on that board.
They going to do some twinking to included the fav sitting areas? Like Carlise PA and Blacksburg????So your not 1 or 2 miles off a board??
They had the opportunity to do just that, but they didn't even solicit feedback from drivers on the implementation of these things. They just did it, then figured we'll patch it up when we get feedback from everyone. That's bad enough, as they had the perfect opportunity to prevent a lot of the things they are having to go back and redo, but when the boards first came out, to get a message that said we cannot make a better decision based on our experience, well, we've seen that to not be true. They didn't know they were messed up, but that's because they failed to talk with the drivers while they were making the changes.
Yeah, improvements are coming, but slowly. It's easy to say better late than never, but people have been screaming about some of these things for years and they're just now getting to them, and they're doing them halfassed, at that. If you're going to do something, you might as well do it right. Right? (grumble, grumble, grumble, complain, complain, complain, yeah, I know. but at least I offer suggestions right along with it.)
I have all kinds of patience, except for incompetence. For that I have none.
They are redoing the boards, and in a manner that makes sense, or so it seems. Well, some sense, anyway. Meaning, if you used to sit someplace and were on three boards, each board having 2 trucks and 2 loads a day, that should now be one board with 6 trucks and 6 loads a day. Same thing. That's a good thing.
But I sat here this morning and watched the Lexington board morph into the Paris, KY board. Thaaaaat's just stupid. One of the few boards they had right by default, they go and change it. It's almost, not quite, but almost, as stupid as someone in the office redefining these boards without a couple of very experienced drivers sitting right there next to them while they do it. They've done it without intelligent, experienced input already, and we saw how that turned out. I would hope they are getting driver input on the details, but for some reason I don't think they are. At least not the kind that's required.
I can almost guarantee you they chose Paris because it's more centrally located, physically, between one board and the next, it's a Zip Code thing, instead of a common sense or intelligent sense thing. It's the same reason we have a Green Pond board. I mean, sheesh, it's OK if a board's physical boundaries are lopsided and shaped like a pond instead of a perfect circle. But calling it Lexington would put it too close to the Louisville board. No, wait, I mean the Shepherdsville board. <snort>
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Does it really matter which half of the fried worm they eat or only that they fried it and ate it? Oh wait, what I mean is does it matter what they call the boards or just that they're grouped/zoned/aligned/whatever with where the freight is and do a better job of getting people to the right area?
Leo, ultimately, no, it doesn't matter what they call the boards. They could have five Kentucky boards and call them KY-1 through KY-5, as far as that goes. What matters is they have the boards properly defined, based on freight movement and common sense, and with detailed input from drivers, dispatchers and CSR's (Customer Service Reps for you non-feline folks).
Paris isn't that far from Lexington, so telling someone to go to Paris is gonna get them in the right area, even though telling them to go to Lexington makes more sense just from the logical perspective. It's like calling it Trafford when it's actually Birmingham, because Trafford is more physically in the center of the board that encompasses Birmingham. It's silly, makes no logical sense to anyone other than someone looking at Zip Codes and related boundaries. For Trafford, the suggested truck stop to layover is the J in, Ta-Da, Birmingham. That fact alone should define the board as the Birmingham board.
Newbies are gonna goto Paris and find there is nowhere to sit. Yeah, they can give us a truck stop location, but they'll only give us one, maybe two, I dunno. They certainly won't give all of the trucks stops that are within the Paris board. If they give one of the Pilots as the suggested layover spot, there will be people who will drive up right past the Loves and 3 other perfectly suitable struck stops on the east and southeast side of Lexington, also on the Paris board, and waste time and fuel going to the Pilot when they don't need to. Is someone at Panther going to compile a comprehensive list of all available truck stops that are within a given board? Not likely. (More likely is Panther soliciting money from a truck stop in exchange for the recommendation lol).
Be that as it may, if they are doing two states per day, there is no way they are looking at this with any kind of common (expedited trucker common) sense and intelligence. They can't be, they're not that smart nor that fast. They're not expediters. They're making some refinements, but not the kind of detail these boards need. The fact that they can redefine a board that contains Lexington and then call it the Paris board speak volumes. I'd bet real money that it's because of where Paris physically is on a map more than anything else. They're doing it quick and dirty just like before. The boards will be better defined than before, yes, but they aren't taking the time to examine the details that something of this scale requires.
For example. You can be sitting at the Pilot or TA in Lodi (or Seville, you know the one) and you're on the Sandusky/Milan board. There is no way common sense, nor a road map, was employed in that bit of comic genius. The roads, the routing, between those truck stops and Milan/Sandusky is not exactly ideal for expedited time-sensitive pickup. In fact, it makes no sense at all to dispatch trucks from Lodi to Sandusky, unless that's all you've got left to dispatch. Trucks dispatched from that location should be dispatched on the Akron/Cleveland board, as the roads from there are straight shots into greater Akron and Cleveland. And even Euclid, way up on the northeast side of Cleveland, is quicker to get to than Sandusky from Lodi. It's further, but it's actually quicker to get from the TA to Bucyrus than it is to Sandusky.
There is no way stuff like that is being properly taken into account when they're doing 2 states a day and doing stuff like renaming the Lexington board to the Paris board. Calling it Paris isn't the problem, it's a symptom.
Paris isn't that far from Lexington, so telling someone to go to Paris is gonna get them in the right area, even though telling them to go to Lexington makes more sense just from the logical perspective. It's like calling it Trafford when it's actually Birmingham, because Trafford is more physically in the center of the board that encompasses Birmingham. It's silly, makes no logical sense to anyone other than someone looking at Zip Codes and related boundaries. For Trafford, the suggested truck stop to layover is the J in, Ta-Da, Birmingham. That fact alone should define the board as the Birmingham board.
Newbies are gonna goto Paris and find there is nowhere to sit. Yeah, they can give us a truck stop location, but they'll only give us one, maybe two, I dunno. They certainly won't give all of the trucks stops that are within the Paris board. If they give one of the Pilots as the suggested layover spot, there will be people who will drive up right past the Loves and 3 other perfectly suitable struck stops on the east and southeast side of Lexington, also on the Paris board, and waste time and fuel going to the Pilot when they don't need to. Is someone at Panther going to compile a comprehensive list of all available truck stops that are within a given board? Not likely. (More likely is Panther soliciting money from a truck stop in exchange for the recommendation lol).
Be that as it may, if they are doing two states per day, there is no way they are looking at this with any kind of common (expedited trucker common) sense and intelligence. They can't be, they're not that smart nor that fast. They're not expediters. They're making some refinements, but not the kind of detail these boards need. The fact that they can redefine a board that contains Lexington and then call it the Paris board speak volumes. I'd bet real money that it's because of where Paris physically is on a map more than anything else. They're doing it quick and dirty just like before. The boards will be better defined than before, yes, but they aren't taking the time to examine the details that something of this scale requires.
For example. You can be sitting at the Pilot or TA in Lodi (or Seville, you know the one) and you're on the Sandusky/Milan board. There is no way common sense, nor a road map, was employed in that bit of comic genius. The roads, the routing, between those truck stops and Milan/Sandusky is not exactly ideal for expedited time-sensitive pickup. In fact, it makes no sense at all to dispatch trucks from Lodi to Sandusky, unless that's all you've got left to dispatch. Trucks dispatched from that location should be dispatched on the Akron/Cleveland board, as the roads from there are straight shots into greater Akron and Cleveland. And even Euclid, way up on the northeast side of Cleveland, is quicker to get to than Sandusky from Lodi. It's further, but it's actually quicker to get from the TA to Bucyrus than it is to Sandusky.
There is no way stuff like that is being properly taken into account when they're doing 2 states a day and doing stuff like renaming the Lexington board to the Paris board. Calling it Paris isn't the problem, it's a symptom.
Leo, you and the rest of the Drivers' Council deserve a lot of credit - the go between is seldom appreciated enough by either side, and you're a pretty stand-up guy to volunteer for the headaches. Hope you get more tangible rewards than just the satisfaction of trying to do the right thing, even if it's in your 'next' life, lol.
Tennesseahawk
Veteran Expediter
Turtle... kinda sounds familiar.
"Let's get a bunch of talking heads and yes-men together and come up with national healthcare. Nah... we don't need no stinkin doctors or anyone like that. Lawyers know EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING."
To me, this drivers council comes across as a bunch of company heads listening to a bunch of driver reps and nodding their skulls, with a few "hmms" in for good measure. Kinda like union reps without the clout.
"Let's get a bunch of talking heads and yes-men together and come up with national healthcare. Nah... we don't need no stinkin doctors or anyone like that. Lawyers know EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING."
To me, this drivers council comes across as a bunch of company heads listening to a bunch of driver reps and nodding their skulls, with a few "hmms" in for good measure. Kinda like union reps without the clout.
Hawk, I don't think it's that simplistic at Panther. I do know that the suggestions put forth from the Council are appreciated and listened to by the company heads. Proof of that is the fact that many (well, a few, anyway, the easy ones, at least) of the suggestions have been implemented, and many others are in the process of being implemented. The problem is in the manner in which they are being implemented.
treilly:
If by "arrival call" you mean arriving at the shipper, or the consignee, or at some other location, the Qualcomm satellite monitors GPS coordinates pretty well.
treilly:
huh?
If by "arrival call" you mean arriving at the shipper, or the consignee, or at some other location, the Qualcomm satellite monitors GPS coordinates pretty well.