A potential economic recession and the supply chain bullwhip are colliding

Freightwaves’s SONAR app has a lot of excellent data that it makes readily available. This post by the CEO shows some clear trends in freight, particularly ocean freight.

One of the interesting graphs shows that recently the number of containers per shipment has dropped a lot. It’s based on the number of bills of lading, and the container volumes in twenty-foot units (TEU) in green.

The most obvious fact predicting this number is that order size for containers is dropping. Perhaps the shippers need less stuff.

Or perhaps they are finding other ways to get them. Walmart and Home Depot, for instance, are running their own liner services, so perhaps shipments moved on them are not showing up. Or perhaps they are ordering domestically.

The service on the container lines and alliances has been so horrible that supply chain managers who really need reliability are becoming squeamish about using them.

I think we can look for these ratios to stay similar till the container lines and alliances start regularizing their schedules and improving their on-time delivery rates.

SONAR is a good place to look for an overview. Now there needs to be some analysis. Visibility is only so valuable. It needs analytics to determine causes and relationships.

Craig Fuller, CEO at FreightWaves Follow on TwitterTuesday, June 21, 2022

A potential economic recession and the supply chain bullwhip are colliding – FreightWaves