Plan for the Holidays!

Transportation and holidays

Just like any other industries, 3PL businesses and the global transportation industry is affected by statuary holidays.

Canada holidays

In Canada, there are nine official statuary holydays every year: New Year’s Day, Good Friday, Victoria Day, Canada Day, Labour Day, Thanksgiving Day, Remembrance Day, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day. Then you have some provincial holydays like St-jean Baptiste in Quebec and Family Day in Ontario. In the U.S. , there are 10 annual federal Holydays but most private businesses will observe only the “big six” (New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas).

One of the tasks as a traffic manager will be to forecast traffic in an efficient way through those holidays when availability of the equipment can drop. We observe a change in the regular schedule for the different transportation lanes, even though transportation is considered an essential service and as to keep operating during holydays.

RM Logistic can help

This is when RM Logistic can help foresee the schedule changes in advance. Being well prepared in securing the equipment will be a tremendous asset for your supply chain when equipment is scarce.

Every time there is a holiday in a week, your time window for shipping and receiving will drop by up to 20%. This means that most businesses want to ship as much cargo as they usually do and respect their regular transit time, but want to do it in a compressed work week. Technically, the goal is to be more effective, but it also means you put yourself under a lot more stress. Keep in mind that your reaction time is also lessen if something does not go according to plan.

Having a card up your sleeve could get you out of a sticky situation at that point. If you ever get cut last minute, a 3PL Logistics partner like RM Logistic will have the volume and the network to sometimes pull some strings to help you reaching your shipping and transit time targets.

Remember, respecting shipping dates, cancel dates or transit time or on any move, but especially on those challenging occasions, is the best way to show your partners you are worth their business!