Port Access Denied. Now What?

Dan:
And we’re back for another round of Safety Stock, real juicy news drop this weekend. Will, did you possibly see what what happened out there?

Will:
I want you to tell me,

Dan:
Yeah, I’m, I’m actually intrigued by this two billionaires, little love triangle, Eli Musk, Serge Brin, the supply chain of a messy divorce filing two best friends added again over a woman’s heart.

Will:
Dan, I feel like you probably watched days of our lives

Dan:
Still on

Will:
Air. Isn’t it. You home sick

Dan:
Still on it’s like 50 seasons right there.

Will:
Yeah. It’s it’s I think so

Dan:
Open invite Sergey, Brun, Elon Musk, whenever you want, we’re ready for you.

Will:
There you go.

Dan:
We don’t even need to talk about Twitter. We got plenty of stuff. We Elon Musk we can talk about.

Will:
Well, you know, one of the things that I’m sure he’s interested in, because he has a plant in Fremont, California is the strikes that are going on in Oakland, preventing the port from operating properly. Dan, I think, you know, this episode, what we’re going to cover is when you have really a disaster or a emergency situation where you are not able to access a port that you typically ship out of, what are some of the things that you can do? What are some of the things that you can’t do and how do you mitigate some of those situations?

Dan:
Yeah. And just for context for everyone that’s happening, the port of Oakland has been seen with some protests for the last two weeks due to these truckers protesting the California assembly, bill number five, which is a law requiring sort of industries to classify contractors as regular benefited employees. And so which we’ve seen across other industries as well, taxi drivers Ubers especially in New York city in the past and unionization with other like Starbucks as well. But this is what’s happening in Oakland two weeks now. And port of Oakland mainly used for coffee, wine and electronics as well. And he mentioned Fremont earlier. So to your question earlier, what do you do first? If you’re, if your stuff has landed in Oakland, I’m sorry, but you’re unfortunately screwed for, you know, better. It’s probably your other terms you could use throughout there. But unfortunately you’re stuck.

Dan:
You’re at the mercy of these independent truck drivers until the strike ends. But what can you do to prevent that? If you know, you have an upcoming shipment to Oakland, well, there’s other ports in California nearby, you have San Francisco, you can go further south to long beach Los Angeles. Those ports are not impacted so far by the strike, or you can go even north of that and possibly Dawkin Washington state and then truck it down. So there’s things you can do if you’re looking at what your forecast is for incoming freight. If you’re on the water right now, highly recommend talking to your Porter, if they could possibly reroute your goods to another port, because they do stop at other ports on the way, if there’s a, if they can do a change there but being real close contact with your freight Forer for any of these delays or strikes that are impacting your supply chain.

Will:
Yeah I, I think it’s important. It’s important for people to know that when you’re, once your goods are on a boat or if they are close to the destination that’s affected, there’s, there’s not much you’re gonna be able to do. And, and we’ve seen this before, just normal operating procedures. When you know, things we’re moving slow in long beach or in LA, when they had the backup of containers, there wasn’t much you could do from the perspective of your goods being on there. You were having to wait and you were in the line, you, you couldn’t make that change. So to Dan’s point, the time to make the change is before your goods have gotten on a boat, or if you know that the boat is stopping at other ports prior to the one that’s going to get there. I think the other big thing to think about in that you’re seeing articles moving forward here is that people are now looking at other places in general to ship some of their goods.

Will:
And so this is the point in time where you can talk to your forward and say, do you have other lanes that you manage? And what are the typical days that it’s taking to get from point a to point B by using those lanes? And if there are cost differences, you can, you can take a look at the cost differences. And if there are days differences, you can evaluate that and say, okay, am I still getting a similar service in a similar cost by going to a different route? And if so, that may be a way for you to take advantage of less busier ports or less volatile ports, and then have your goods come in in a more reliable manner.

Dan:
Yeah. And your for should be, should be doing that. Not now, they, obviously one of the main things you optimize for is price. Cuz you wanna pay for the, the cheapest possible lane for freight, but you also do wanna be current on what’s happening that could disrupt your port, just like what’s happening in, in Oakland right now. So your for should be able to map out what those lanes are for you proactively. And then you should be able to figure and, and then choose the, choose the right option. So hopefully they are doing that for you. If not highly recommend, just asking that cuz you can, your goods can be on a rail or truck, any distance. We’ve seen cross country freight all the time. So yeah, nothing abnormal there.

Will:
I think it’s important to know too that you, as a business need to ask the freight forwarder because most of the time the freight forwarder is not going to come with the solutions.

Dan:
Don’t assume you, you shouldn’t assume at all in this work, they’re busy.

Will:
Yeah. They’re busy and they’re so for them to go and proactively go to you and say, Hey, we’re gonna have a different way for you to get your goods. It is most likely not going to happen. You’re gonna have to be proactive and engage them. And really lead this effort and news

Dan:
About that is like the port of like Los Angeles, which has had huge like backlogs they’re waiting time to unload goods has fallen 80% since the start of this year. So there, there is headway in progress being made at called sister ports out there, which is a relief. So because the backlog is dwindling there, truckers can fully move. You can unload. It actually may be faster to go to some other ports and then just truck it up cuz you know, truck drive from LA to Oakland is it’s one business deck.

Will:
And if you have interesting stories about some of your goods that are stuck and what you’ve done to get them unstuck that we haven’t covered today, let us know, reach out to us at hello@anvyl.com that’s com tell your.