The morning my delivery schedule fell apart taught me more than any seminar

Last Tuesday I had 14 trucks scheduled to unload by 9 AM and three of them showed up at the same time, two hours late. My usual move was to just yell and rework the dock assignments, but this time I sat down with the head dispatcher, Dave from Ogden, and mapped out every bottleneck on a whiteboard for 45 minutes. We found the issue was a single packing slip error at the supplier, not our crew, and it made me realize I rarely check the actual data before blaming my team. Has anyone else had a failure that turned into your best operational lesson, or is it just me?

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1 Comment

dakota_murphy901mo agoTop Commenter

Well, that story hits close to home. My husband does the same thing with our garage door opener every time it acts up. He'll take the whole track apart before realizing the sensor just needed a good cleaning. It's funny how we all tend to jump to fixing the loudest problem instead of checking the quiet little details first. Good on you for taking the time to actually look at the paper trail before pointing fingers, that's a habit most folks never pick up.