soberups
Pees in the brown Koolaid
Now that the worst blizzard in Western Oregon history is....history....I'd like to be a Monday-morning quarterback and offer a few suggestions to management on how the snow situation could better be handled next time.
Snow removal; during peak, a lot of our routes are loaded outside the building on temporary MDU's made of rollers on moveable platforms. The cars inside the building cannot leave until these MDU's are disconnected and moved out of the way. The MDU's are on wheels and are normally moved by a forklift, but when the snow buried us the forklift got stuck and the MDU's were immoveable, effectively imprisoning the cars behind them. Our building needs to either own (or rent during the winter) a "bobcat" mini front-end loader that could at least clear the areas around the MDU's of snow until such time as a outside service can be called in to plow the whole lot. We had routes that were loaded and ready to go that were stuck in the building for over an hour in the AM due to this.
Snow chains; the rule against driving inside the building with chains on (to protect the floor) needs to be overturned. Our building suffered from gridlock in the mornings as over 200 cars had to stop in the parking lot in order to chain up. It took some drivers over an hour just to get out of the gate due to the resulting traffic jam. Whatever it might cost to resurface or refinish the concrete floor cannot possibly compare to the extra overtime and service failures caused by 250 drivers having to install and remove chains each day for 2 weeks while stuck in a traffic jam.
Helpers on bicycles; We deliberately avoided hiring peak drivers and instead chose to rely on helpers with bicycles. This plan was unrealistic to begin with, and once the snow hit the bikes were useless and we got caught with our pants down in terms of having a totally inadequate number of drivers and rental trucks available. The bicycle idea might be "green" and it may work in limited situations in warm-weather climates, but not here. Even without snow, this area is too hilly and too rainy, and during peak it gets pitch black outside by 4:45 PM. Whatever small number of stops a bike might be able to deliver will frequently be offset by the fact that the driver who supplies the stops has to (a) hook up a rental trailer full of the stops (b) tow the trailer out to the area (c) unhook it (d) take the time to sort and deliver any packages that are too large or heavy for the bicycle to deal with and then (e) plan his entire route around having to go back to that same area in the evening to retrieve the trailer and haul it back to the building. In addition, each bicycle route that is fed from a rental trailer takes up a parking space in an already horribly overcrowded building. Its a bad idea. Let it go.
Retain trailers; We didnt have enough, nor was there enough room to park them. We wound up with twenty something retain trailers in the employee parking lot. We need more. We also need a plan to sort retain volume into multiple trailers by ZIP code, so that those trailers could perhaps be taken out on area and used as "mother ships" to feed routes instead of trying (and failing) to sort all the volume at the building.
Pickup routes; Consider utilizing peak hires in rentals to do nothing but pickup routes. A regular driver who is chained to a pickup route must return to the building in time for his pickup volume to be processed. He must break trace in order to start that pickup route on time. He also frequently runs into containment issues, since a driver in a P700 cannot just shove 500 cubic feet of pickup volume in over the top of the 400 cubic feet of deliveries he still has left in the car at 3:00 in the afternoon. A pickup-only route also does not require a scarce parking spot in the AM. This would maximize the delivery efficiency of an experienced driver-helper team in a package car, while pickups can be seviced using the less-trained peak hires to do the low-skill "grunt work" in rental trucks.
Snow removal; during peak, a lot of our routes are loaded outside the building on temporary MDU's made of rollers on moveable platforms. The cars inside the building cannot leave until these MDU's are disconnected and moved out of the way. The MDU's are on wheels and are normally moved by a forklift, but when the snow buried us the forklift got stuck and the MDU's were immoveable, effectively imprisoning the cars behind them. Our building needs to either own (or rent during the winter) a "bobcat" mini front-end loader that could at least clear the areas around the MDU's of snow until such time as a outside service can be called in to plow the whole lot. We had routes that were loaded and ready to go that were stuck in the building for over an hour in the AM due to this.
Snow chains; the rule against driving inside the building with chains on (to protect the floor) needs to be overturned. Our building suffered from gridlock in the mornings as over 200 cars had to stop in the parking lot in order to chain up. It took some drivers over an hour just to get out of the gate due to the resulting traffic jam. Whatever it might cost to resurface or refinish the concrete floor cannot possibly compare to the extra overtime and service failures caused by 250 drivers having to install and remove chains each day for 2 weeks while stuck in a traffic jam.
Helpers on bicycles; We deliberately avoided hiring peak drivers and instead chose to rely on helpers with bicycles. This plan was unrealistic to begin with, and once the snow hit the bikes were useless and we got caught with our pants down in terms of having a totally inadequate number of drivers and rental trucks available. The bicycle idea might be "green" and it may work in limited situations in warm-weather climates, but not here. Even without snow, this area is too hilly and too rainy, and during peak it gets pitch black outside by 4:45 PM. Whatever small number of stops a bike might be able to deliver will frequently be offset by the fact that the driver who supplies the stops has to (a) hook up a rental trailer full of the stops (b) tow the trailer out to the area (c) unhook it (d) take the time to sort and deliver any packages that are too large or heavy for the bicycle to deal with and then (e) plan his entire route around having to go back to that same area in the evening to retrieve the trailer and haul it back to the building. In addition, each bicycle route that is fed from a rental trailer takes up a parking space in an already horribly overcrowded building. Its a bad idea. Let it go.
Retain trailers; We didnt have enough, nor was there enough room to park them. We wound up with twenty something retain trailers in the employee parking lot. We need more. We also need a plan to sort retain volume into multiple trailers by ZIP code, so that those trailers could perhaps be taken out on area and used as "mother ships" to feed routes instead of trying (and failing) to sort all the volume at the building.
Pickup routes; Consider utilizing peak hires in rentals to do nothing but pickup routes. A regular driver who is chained to a pickup route must return to the building in time for his pickup volume to be processed. He must break trace in order to start that pickup route on time. He also frequently runs into containment issues, since a driver in a P700 cannot just shove 500 cubic feet of pickup volume in over the top of the 400 cubic feet of deliveries he still has left in the car at 3:00 in the afternoon. A pickup-only route also does not require a scarce parking spot in the AM. This would maximize the delivery efficiency of an experienced driver-helper team in a package car, while pickups can be seviced using the less-trained peak hires to do the low-skill "grunt work" in rental trucks.
