Sometimes, simple solutions are best. Schneider National, like almost every other trucking company on the continent, was trying to minimize the negative effects of the U.S. hours-of-service regulations that came into effect in January. One part of the plan? Reduce loading and unloading time.

Enter the “detention charge,” an accessorial fee based on how long it takes customers to turn the trucks and trailers around.
So did Schneider turn to some sophisticated satellite-tracking system?

Nope.

Rather, they began asking customers to verify arrival and departure times with signatures on shipping documents.

Mark Cleveland, president of TripPak Services, says a form printed on the outside of Schneider TripPak envelopes provides slots to enter the appointment time, actual arrival time, loading or unloading times as well as the actual departure moment. The form asks for driver and shipper or consignee signatures. Envelopes supporting detention charges – a levy based on how long it takes to turn a truck around – can then be routed for billing, Cleveland says.

Clever, no? What’s more, as Cleveland points out, the signature method can be implemented by the smallest fleet.

It’s also indicative of the numerous innovations truckers from coast to coast have come up with in response to the new rules. We’re seven months in, and while many industry experts report that the changeover to the new hours-of-service system has been smoother than they expected, it has also been at times confusing and costly.

In the first two weeks of the new system, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMSCA) 24-hour hotline fielded some 5,500 calls from truckers looking for clarification on the 34-hour restart, the split-sleeper-berth option, on-duty changes, and logging under the revised rules.

While it’s premature to say exactly how big of a toll the rules have taken on balance sheets, Rob Penner, the vice president of operations at Bison Transport in Winnipeg, estimates that productivity has dropped by about seven per cent since hours of service changed.

Fleets are facing increased costs; they’ve had to increase the number of teams; some have replaced day cabs with sleeper berths; there’s a shortage of actual parking spots because more drivers are being forced to go off duty at what has become known as the “witching hour”; and finally, says Rene Robert, a veteran owner/operator out of Calgary, “we just don’t get home as much as we used to.”

And Brian Orrbine, Transport Canada’s point man on the hours-of-service rules that will be implemented here in January 2005, says the ultimate irony is that measuring whether the new rules improve highway safety is virtually impossible because of the minuscule number of highway fatalities that can be attributed to tired truck drivers.

Throughout the schmozzle, the industry adapts. And like Schneider’s clever but simple means of tracking their trucks with signatures, many of the solutions that have arisen can be applied by firms large and small.

While detention charges and other accessorial fees are common reactions, carriers are also looking inward to see where they might be wasting driver time. At Schneider, for example, an hours-of-service team analyzed driver delays and, among other things, found that some transportation planners didn’t even start looking for another load until a driver reported empty. That meant drivers could spend anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours waiting for their next assignment. Schneider is now pre-assigning more loads.

G&P Trucking of Gaston, N.C., is mainly a regional fleet with loads of 500 miles or less. Under the old rules, drivers’ on-duty time was limited to 15 hours and that didn’t count meals or breaks, so drivers were home every night.

The new 14-hour on-duty limit, which includes meals and breaks, makes that impossible in many cases. According to G&P President Clifton Parker, their January bill for driver hotel rooms was $22,000 more than any month the previous year. So G&P is also looking at replacing its 274 daycab tractors with sleepers. Parker acknowledges that the sleeper option isn’t ideal, but the ability to take two hours in the sleeper enables more drivers to get home every night – even if they have to spend some of their home time in the sleeper. (Of course, as owner/operator Robert points out, just because you’re logging sleeper-berth time doesn’t mean you’re getting any sleep.)

Drivers such as Robert who cross the U.S.-Canada border get hit with a double-edged sword because not only are border waiting times longer as a result of increased security measures, the new rules state that more of the driver’s waiting time must be considered on duty. The fixes? Minimize border crossing time and introduce a border-cost accessorial fee.

It means creative scheduling for Canadian carriers who are sending their drivers south, but it also means letting your customers know that they share the problem. Rob Penner put it this way: “Shippers have to be aware that we will charge for detention at the dock, but we’ll also charge for detention at the border if it’s not driver-related.

“All of the shippers,” he says, “are starting to take paperwork very seriously so the driver doesn’t sit there shuffling through documents.”

Bison’s Penner says this means not only rescheduling, but persuading customers to change their hours of shipping and receiving. “It’s not easy to change some of those long-held traditions, but we’re trying,” he says.

Some Canadian trucking veterans see the increased border wait times as an intractable problem. American customs agents are x-raying and inspecting more loads, lineups are longer, and now, under the new rules, drivers are unable to treat the time spent waiting as off duty. So they’re losing hours and losing money.
“If you’re in line for customs for seven hours,” observes one experienced driver, “you can hardly hide that because you’re moving ahead a few feet every few minutes. You have to be very creative with your log.”

As manager of contractor services at SLH Transport Inc., based in Kingston, On., Sheldon Hayes oversees about 475 owner/operators. His best advice for contractors who want to avoid the cross-border HOS-related problems? “Stay in Canada,” he says with a laugh.

Working more closely with shippers is critical for successful adaptation to the new HOS rules. “As an industry,” says Schnieder’s Osterberg, “we were probably late in communicating to our customers the behaviour changes that would be required.
“It’s one thing to say that we’re going to have to reduce non-productive driver time by making supply chains more efficient. It’s another thing to put a mechanism in place to affect that change.” And that, says SLH’s Hayes, means developing trusting relationships, so nobody thinks they’re being assessed unfairly.
West Side Transport’s safety supervisor Chris Pierce said West Side’s customers for the most part have been cooperative, though some had to be nudged by stricter detention rules. “In the past, a driver may have had a delivery window of six to eight hours. He’d show up at 8 a.m. and might have to sit until 4 o’clock in the afternoon to get unloaded. That doesn’t happen now.”
Tracking is key.

Perhaps the clearest example is J.B. Hunt, the second largest truckload carrier in the U.S.A. and the first major carrier to outfit its fleet with trailer tracking. Hunt is using the trailer tracking provided by Terion Inc. to document not only trailer departure and arrival times but also when trailers are actually loaded and unloaded.
Mark Palmer, J.B. Hunt’s director of trailer operations, says that previously, Hunt relied on drivers to report times. Many customers challenged the accuracy. Now, impersonal trailer-tracking technology acts as a neutral third party.

“We’ve been able to notify customers when they’re approaching the detention clock. We send an email or text message
to warn them,” he says. In some cases these notifications have reduced detention charges, which is fine with the carrier.

“Our goal isn’t really to bill detention, but to get our trailers back,” Palmer said. “By not allowing customers to keep boxes too long – to use them as storage trailers-we keep trailers freed up up so we can load them.”

J.B. Hunt detention charges depend on whether or not a power unit is involved. Detention for a power unit and trailer begins after an hour of free time and runs roughly a dollar a minute, more specifically $60 per hour, $15 for each quarter of an hour or fraction thereof. The maximum charge is $600 a day. A trailer alone gets 12 hours free time, then $50 for each 24 hours or portion thereof.

Finally, at SLH, Hayes says part of the solution lies in determining whose pocket the detention pay actually goes into: the driver’s or the employer’s. “It has to be fair,” he says.HOS help may be on the way from an unlikely source: the lowly pallet.

CHEP, a pallet pooling service used by some of the largest shippers in the business – Procter&Gamble and Kraft to name
two – is taking pallets high-tech with Radio Frequency Identification, known as RFID.

RFID tags, consisting of tiny computer chips and antennae, will be placed on CHEP pallets for customers using CHEP’s new PLUS ID service. At the shipper’s warehouse, as RFID-tagged cases of goods are placed on the pallet, they get scanned and entered into a central database accessed via the Internet.

That pallet will then be identified by the system as carrying those specific goods. As the pallet goes from the shipper’s warehouse to the receiver’s warehouse, the RFID tag on the pallet will be read by special scanners at each location as the forklift carries the pallets through the dock door.

The central database can track the movement of the goods with a single scan of the pallet, rather than scanning each item on that pallet. That information will be automatically entered into the participant’s inventory software.

CHEP has spent six years developing the technology, including a year-long pilot of 250,000 pallets in its home state of Florida. They experimented with various types of tags and locations in order to find one that would be read virtually 100 per cent of the time without being damaged by forklifts.

Along with improved inventory tracking for shippers and retailers, RFID will make for faster receiving and shipping.

“RFID will enable automated receiving, which has the potential for enormous savings by reducing the time that trucks have to sit at loading docks,” says Simon Ellis, supply chain futurist at Unilever.
The question is, how do you get shippers and receivers to invest in the RFID technology?

Enter Wal-Mart. The world’s largest retailer announced in November that it has directed its top 100 suppliers to begin using RFID-enabled tags on all pallets and case loads of product shipped to its stores and distribution centres by January 2005.
All suppliers – 10,000 of them – will be required to use the technology by 2006. Other companies, however, such as J.C. Penney and Sears, are waiting to see how things go with Wal-Mart and for prices to come down.Is more sleeper-berth flexibility in the works?

Not only are trucking companies adapting to the new rules, there’s still a chance the new rules will adapt to the truckers. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Association (FMCSA) is considering a recommendation by American Trucking Associations (ATA) to make the sleeper-berth rule more flexible.

Right now the rule says that the only way to extend the 14-hour limit is to combine two periods in the sleeper berth. Drivers may not combine, say, a two-hour sleeper-berth break with an off-duty break.

The ATA suggested that a sleeper-berth driver be allowed to extend the 14-hour limit by combining a sleeper-berth period of at least two hours with an off-duty period of at least 10 consecutive hours, provided he does not exceed 14 cumulative hours of work or 11 hours of driving. This would encourage naps, because drivers would not lose work hours, and the 10-hour break would encourage longer and better sleep, ATA said.

The agency has said the ATA request raises “genuine issues in need of resolution.” Action on the rulemaking may come by summer, said Dave Osiecki, vice president of safety policy at ATA.