I mentioned last week how bad things have been at work with regard to deliveries missing their time slots. This resulted in a suspended sales account for an online platform which can be disastrous as the sales are frozen generating no income.
This morning the other online account was also frozen/suspended due to a late delivery. The trucking company collected the items on Friday and had mechanical issues over the weekend with a truck having a cracked axle. The two trucks waiting to deliver the items were in place, but the main truck driving between Johannesburg and Cape Town never arrived on time.
No one cares for the reasons and you have missed your time slot so you are automatically suspended. There is no come backs on the trucking company and you the client are screwed. I was not involved in either of these deliveries that missed their slots totaling 3 now. So in the last week the strike rate is 1 out of 4 or 25% which is rather poor in anyone's book.
The question is do I get involved now and add my 5 cents of wisdom or not? This is not an easy fix because this is out of your hands, they have another two spare accounts they can use which is the only positive. I would suggest moving from a Monday to a Tuesday delivery slot or the truck collects one day earlier. This would mean that some stock needs to be stored in Cape Town for any sales that happen on Friday's. The problem is the 72 hour delivery window and why they use Mondays and Wednesdays as delivery dates.
The only way around this is to store a small stock holding in Cape Town because changing the delivery dates will not match the order schedules that run at 72 hours. This is the only way that they can take back control of their accounts as the trucking side will always be a problem that you cannot control. It doesn't matter how many extra accounts you have on stand by as they have already burned 2 within the last 7 days. They are frozen for a period of time and do not know exactly how long and would guess 30 days.
I just find it quite incredible with all the technology we have at our fingertips today that there are companies who still mess up and there seems to be only Plan A and no Plan B or C. The account suspensions could ruin a business as no income is literally no income for an extended period of time even if it is not your fault.