This fireside chat recap is from Day 1 of FreightWaves LIVE @HOME.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Navigating uncharted territory in the transportation industry
DETAILS: A discussion on delays in ocean freight shipments and how to best manage the challenges.
INTERVIEWER and SPEAKER: Trey Griggs, VP of sales with Lean Solutions Group, and Dan Kopp, CEO of ITG Transportation Services.
BIO:
Kopp took over the reins at ITG, a 34-year-old family-owned freight brokerage at the beginning of 2020. Prior to taking on the role, he served for five years as the company’s VP of sales and development. During that time, he was responsible not only for overseeing the sales team but also for the successful implementation of a number of operational and systematic changes that ultimately led to ITG doubling in size. Prior to ITG, Kopp worked in institutional development as the Northwest regional director for the University of Rochester.
KEY QUOTES FROM KOPP:
On the ocean cargo environment: “The biggest shock as I sit down and talk to our team is the number of times they are all having to touch a file over the past year. On the export side, changes in scheduling, earliest return dates are changing, you can’t get appointments to get back into terminals. What otherwise would be maybe you touch a file four or five times over the course of its life, they’re jumping in, especially on the export side, 10, 15 times. Even if our volumes were to stay exactly the same, the amount of work that’s required for each file has grown significantly.”
On recovering from a missed load: “Normally if a carrier drops a load or has to give one back to you, there’s somebody else out there that you can go give it to. We provide our customers with availability reports on a daily basis and some markets we are looking weeks out and so the recovery process of a missed load is incredibly challenging right now.”
On the supply chain returning to normalcy: “We’ll be this busy through 2021. This will go into 2022. We’re in May right now. We’re a couple of months out from what is then traditionally peak season in ocean freight. But not only do we have those increased volumes now, the backlogs, there’s pent-up freight overseas that needs to make its way over that’s delayed. There’s also been $1.9 trillion unleashed on the U.S. economy most recently that once that spending starts it’s going to be, I don’t want to say unmanageable, it’s going to continue like this for quite some time. We’re bullish on at least the rest of the year on our side.”
