Gateway OT/Crate and Freight/DeliveXy

The holiday season should be a time for living in the moment, enjoying family and friends, and taking a small deserved break from the hustle and bustle of work. For many, those who plan and organize their companies presence at trade shows, the real work, unfortunately starts when everybody else is getting into the holiday spirit. For over a decade I worked at a company that attends the largest expo on earth. The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) which this year will run January 5-8th. The planning and logistics necessary to have a successful trade show in the first few months of the year always takes place in December. The trade show season every year starts off with a bang, CES and just keeps going from there, with large shows such as MAGIC -Apparel, Furniture and Home Decor - Furniture, Automation Tech - Equipment, Medical Manufacturing - Medical Equipment, Kid Show - Baby and Kid, and The Day Spa Expo - Spa, all taking place in the first few months of the year. The compan...

Gateway deals with a lot of first time international shippers. People looking to sell their goods overseas and looking for the costs involved to make the sale. It is always an educational lesson beyond logistics transportation to explain to people the basics of International sales contracts BEFORE calculating the costs in transportation. I always instruct these people to read up on the latest Incoterms.  Incoterms or International Commercial Terms are internationally recognized standards used in sales contracts to define who is responsible for the goods at each stage of the sales delivery process. This includes who pays for what portion of the transportation and includes who pays for insurance, taxes and duty. What I am providing below is a brief (very brief) interpretation of the latest Incoterms we use here at Gateway and in no way should be regarded as a definitive rule on the terms. For a full understanding of these terms and or changes to them visit www.iccwbo.org ....

So another peak season is upon us and with the growth of e commerce year over year, this holiday shipping season is sure to bring more volume and more challenges. The number one challenge during this time of year is ensuring your items arrive safely to their destination. With so many packages and freight shipments running through the system, damage is the number one issue facing shippers. It has been estimated that shipping packages between October 15 and December 15 increases your chances of damage to your shipment by 36%. In fact some major carriers have published statistics that show over half of their freight damage claims for the year occur in this 2 month period. In a major study of online retailers most report that they plan on a 5% damage ratio of product being shipped during the year and another recent study indicated that the 3 major carriers UPS, USPS and FedEx have damage ratios of 11%, 10% and 7% respectively during the year. The peak season deluge of ship...

We have picked up, crated and packed some pretty large heavy and awkward items over the years including this metal transformer. If you are a movie buff you would recognize this as Bumblebee, at 8 ft high and weighing over 1,000 lbs he needed to be moved from a basement movie theater and shipped to be shown at a Trade Show in Texas. This would have been a much easier job if he could have just transformed into a Camaro and drove himself to the Expo, but in the logistics world not much is that easy. He did disassemble into a few pieces, the largest and heaviest being a leg-torso fitting that was close to 300 lbs. After having four guys get the pieces up a staircase we got Bumblebee back to the warehouse and custom crated him and shipped him off to the show. Once in our warehouse, handling, packing and crating was easy. The logistics of picking these types of items up or delivering them is the difficult part.  Some items we crate, pack and ship are not heavy but just L...

Like many freight shippers you probably have a number of different sized pallets sitting around to ship your product on. For years shipping departments have settled with shipping product on standard sized skids 48 X 40 or some variation thereof. But many have learned that shipping product on skids that are too big or too small leads to damaged product, unhappy customers and lost revenue.  The biggest mistake, and what leads to the most shipping claims is product overhang. You have a 55" box and you let it hang over a standard 48" pallet. This most certainly leads to damage. In a freight system either loading full truckload or LTL, pallet bases are used to bumper each other, in other words once the pallet on the forklift touches the next pallet the forklift driver stops. So invariably if your product is overhanging a pallet there will be pressure from the palleted items being loaded next to it. This will cause damage. This box below greatly overhangs its palle...

V.C.I is an acronym for Volatile Corrosion Inhibitor. V.C.I is a chemical (a film) applied to poly and paper products that provides rust protection against moisture and humidity for steel, iron and metallic components. In the picture above you can see the yellow poly film we use, this is the V.C.I wrap. Gateway Crate and Freight utilizes V.C.I wrap when we ship these types of materials via ocean L.C.L (Less than Container Load) or full container load. We primarily utilize a poly wrap on these materials to protect the items from the damaging effects of salt water and the ocean humidity. The V.C.I wrap works as a desiccant which is a hygroscopic substance used as a drying agent, if you have ever seen the little white canisters in medicine bottles or white packets these are filled with silica gel, an inert, nontoxic water insoluble solid that basically is there to protect your items from the damaging effects of moisture. When shipping International or domestically on the ...

Our clients have become accustomed to using our online transportation management system (T.M.S), ACCUFRATE, to quote, book and track their freight shipments. These clients who use the system to schedule outbound, inbound and third party shipments, all online, love the fact that they can manage their own transportation, they pick the carrier, service and price they want for their shipments. We call these users the (D.I.Y) Do It Yourself T.M.S shipping managers. The whole idea behind a T.M.S is to automate shipping functions. I started developing T.M.S software for use in worldwide distribution centers in the early 90s. Developing T.M.S software that ports to accounting or ERP software and rates, routes, books, tracks and produces reports on these activities was at the time, the most important development in supply chain logistics. Since these early days the T.M.S has come along way and has made it easy for anyone, even those with not much experience in Traffic or Freight managem...