Raising Horses From The Dead?

I'm not going to rant again about the folly of failing to prepare for recovery in the supply chain component of our still-struggling economy.  Beating a dead horse even harder won't change the reality that it's still a dead horse.

But, it is a bit embarrassing that USA Today, in Wednesday's above-the-fold Money feature repeated the now-well-understood woes of shortages and capacity constraints in transportation.  If the Chicken Noodle News of print journalism gets it, why didn't more supply chain service providers anticipate the depth and severity of the problem much earlier?

Full disclosure: I predicted the return of the driver shortage as a critical supply chain issue in economic recovery, but I utterly failed to see how severe and how early the crunch would come.

In the examples cited, PPG Industries has trouble finding trucks to move product to customers, who are apparently still applying just-in-time models to their businesses; both Con-way and Combined Transport are having trouble filling what appear to be modest numbers of driver positions.

What of the consequences, though?  When companies fail to build strong relationships with supply chain partners, they become more vulnerable to breakdowns in capacity, quality, timeliness, and/or quality in markets for commoditized services.

Once again, we learn that trolling for the lowest price in a marketplace of transient and transactional supply chain relationships can have profound cost impacts - consequences that might have been mitigated by maintaining consistent relationships with valued partners.