RWI Transportation's 2012 Temperature-Controlled Transportation Report delves into the challenges of temperature-controlled transportation and the strategies shippers use to overcome these challenges.


Findings include:

-41% of respondents indicate capacity as one of their top three challenges, and 76% indicate they experienced issues with lack of available capacity during peak seasons. "This is not surprising since the truckload industry lost about 20 percent of its capacity since late 2006," the report says. Other major challenges indicated by respondents were maintaining/controlling temperatures (20%) and costs (13%).

-Strategies to improving available capacity include finding new carriers, as reported by 27% of respondents, better planning (22%), long-term contracts or commitments to carriers (13%) and using asset-based carriers/3PLs (6%).

- 65% of respondents reported shipment rejections due to inappropriate temperature variances. Variances with too-warm temperatures account for 42% and too-cool, 23%. Other reasons for rejecting shipments were damaged cases (36.4%), wront product (18.2%) and dirty trucks (13.6%).

-A full 90% of respondents indicated that temperature tolerances impact their organizations, and 38% indicated a significant to extreme impact. Another 26 percent indicate temperature tolerance has a "moderate impact," the report says.

"This report uncovers challenges specific to shippers of products requiring temperature-controlled environments that we are seeing today as we work closely with our customers," says Richard Bauer, executive vice president and general manager of RWI Transportation. "Current solutions to these challenges come from understanding and using the data available on shipments including lanes, location, temperature and more. As technology improves our access to better data increases and brings the industry closer to overcoming these challenges."

Research for this study was conducted in September and October 2011. Respondents were invited to participate in an internet-based survey through an email invitation sent to 9,373 individuals having job functions in transportation, logistics, supply chain, and operations with a title of manager or above from North American shippers of products requiring temperature-controlled shipping environments.