The mass disruptions of the pandemic era forced a broad acknowledgement that there’s an awful lot of waste in the current supply chain, says Chris Pickett, chief operating officer at Flock Freight.

The problem is that it’s hard to counter those inefficiencies when the market is so fragmented, Pickett says. “Oftentimes, it takes reaching across the aisle, either to customers or vendors across the ecosystem, to identify root causes and work together to address them.”

Reaching for greater efficiencies is an important part of preparing oneself for the next leg of the freight cycle “Because of this fragmentation, when market rates are high, that invites more supply to the market,” says Pickett. “Eventually too much supply comes in, because, as irrational human beings, we always overdo it. Right now, we're dealing with the reckoning.”

That volatility is not healthy, Pickett says. “There's nothing pleasant about drivers having to exit the market because they can't make money. Part of what exacerbates the volatility of the cycles that exist today is there's just a lot of waste in the marketplace.” He estimates that some 30% to 35% of truckload capacity is being wasted right now. “Shippers are effectively paying to ship air.”

It's not just wasted space, says Pickett; it's wasted time. When a driver is get paid by the loaded mile, then sits idle at an over-crowded dock, that not only eats up their legal operating hours, it eats into their potential earnings, too.

“We see really incredible opportunities coming along with enabling technologies around machine learning and artificial intelligence,” Pickett says. “As a marketplace, if we can better predict transit times, arrival times and loading times, we can work together not only to make best use of the capacity that we have, but make best use of the time that we have.”