The Traffic Department

Hej, it's me again ;)

Today was again veeery, very interesting.

First I joined Daniela, who is responsible for the traffic to Denmark, Belgium, Holland and Germany. The lorries can be tracked and traced via GPS, which makes everything a lot easier. Moreover, she can communicate with the drivers via this programme. It shows where the lorrydriver is located at the moment, when he should deliver, his phonenumber and she can even send SMS to the driver via this system.
Quite interesting, isn't it??

She also explained me, that the dispatch is not a separate office. As you can see on the left side, it is a very small area where the drivers 'register'. That's because not many drivers come to Värnamo. Most of the times it is like.. a driver collects the goods at the customer and transports it to the receiving country to another Schenker department. Then another driver is responsible to spread the goods. That's the case for bigger goods over 1500kg but the smaller goods are mostly stored in the warehouse and a lorrydriver has to fetch them. In this case, he has to get the documents from Daniela.

After lunch I joined the three lovely ladies from the domestic traffic department. They use a completely different system than Daniela does.  In their programme they can see the bookings which were made and they have to divide them between the 40 lorries they have. So in the system, they switch the lines of the bookings to another part for the drivers. They get the information what they should load via a small computer, which is connected to this system.
Today there were around 800 bookings, and the 40 drivers had to manage it to spread the goods. I think it must be veeeeeeeeeery exhaustive for them, to be responsible for so many goods. But as I said before, Schenker has a lot of small consignments, and sometimes it's only one pallet, so it is manageable. In addition, they do not have to provide the whole country, it's only the area around Värnamo. But I was surprised, when I saw that each of the drivers had around 30 bookings to spread, anyway.

Yeah..Now some things which amazed me as well, haha.
First... I'm so impressed by the office-tables! You can adjust the height of them!!! Some of the employees work while they are sitting, others when they are standing. I think that's a perfect way of variation!!
I tried to take a picture for that, but it looks a bit strange, haha. On the left side there is a table where you can sit, right a table where you can stand while you are working ;)

Another reaaaally interesting point is... working with the screens. Every employee has two sceens. So on one screen you can e.g. see all the new bookings you have to divide for the drivers and on the other screen you can read your e-mails. It's very handy. You can't lose sight of the most important things, which update every minute.

Reflecting today, I have to say, that the differences between Schenker and ECL increase. But I don't mean it in a negative way. It's nice to see other possibilities and that I still have to learn a lot to survive in this vocational field. 


 That's all for today! Tomorrow I'll continue in the traffic department until lunch, because there is another part for Finnland and Norway, and after that I'll see how the terminal works ;)