The supply chain issues the U.S. is facing won’t be solved overnight, says one Hoosier logistics company executive.
Mark DeFabis is the CEO of Integrated Distribution Services, Inc. based in Plainfield. He tells Inside Indiana Business that in order for the supply chain to even back out, many things need to happen over the next year.
“We’re not going to magically create more truck drivers overnight,” DeFabis said. “We need to look at hours of service. Can the drivers we have work an hour or two longer because of all the dwell time they have?
DeFabis also said that Drive Safe Act being considered by Congress needs movement soon. It would allow truck drivers between 18 and 21 years old to be allowed to drive an 18-wheeler across state lines. Right now, that’s illegal.
“I mean right now, they can drive an 18-wheeler from South Bend to Evansville, but they can’t go from Evansville into Kentucky, which I think is ridiculous,” said DeFabis.
He said these things will certainly help get the ball rolling on fixing supply chain bottlenecks. Right now, wait times are significantly longer on getting containers from overseas shipped to the places inland that they need to go from the west coast.
“From the west coast, almost every container has to go through Chicago,” DeFabis said. “In a typical wait time in Chicago’s rail yards to get a container off onto a chassis to it can be transported down south would be about three days. Now you are seeing wait times significantly longer.”
In the grand scheme of things, DeFabis says it will likely be over a year before the supply chain issues can be resolved.
2 comments
defabis is a typical industry ex toady. You solve the shortage problem NOT by turning more KIDS 18-24 into suicide steering wheel holders of 80,000 lb missiles but by raising the age to 25 minimum, adding pay, and most of all getting the HOS from federal bureaucrats who don’t even know what the inside of a semi tractor looks like, out of the way of adults driving trucks. This HOS BS from dc and giant trucking firms like swifty and Verner (yes I know its Werner) so they can keep drivers enslaved to them. They keep letting more and more younger and younger LOW TIME children in big trucks and then complain about the accident rates so they can get more DC regulations to keep driver net pay down. Lots more but gonna stop before I burn up my computer
Not to mention that the “driver shortage” was because of laws passed in California by Newsome and his cronies. They eliminated independent owner operators, they doubled the cost of new engines while eliminating engines over 10 years old which eliminated the small fleets, and they forced all remaining drivers for the big fleets to be union drivers.
When you eliminate over 50% of the drivers via legislation, of course you’ll have a “shortage”. The thing that nobody seems to talk about is that the “shortage” is a symptom, not a cause.