Urgent shipments or proper planning

When we estimate the transport budget for the following year, we usually face the same problem: how much do we budget for special or urgent transport? We hear from our superiors the expression “This is your job in the Logistics Department, to organize yourself so that we do NOT have special transports. So then we budget zero, right?” Is it alright and can it be easy to set a zero target?

Where do these "special" transports come from? Can anyone imagine that a Logistics manager would think, “Nobody said anything about me, nothing bad, for too long – they should hear from me and the department I run! Let's do a special transport!”

Let's explore Planning, starting with the most important one: Production planning - which should be done based on customer orders, based on the availability of machines and production staff, based on known and verified production capacity, following known and verified manufacturing recipes, following clear and measured manufacturing processes, thus obtaining finished products in exact, anticipated, measured and known quantities before planning begins. Production planning can thus be used as a tool in supply planning, transportation planning, unloading and loading planning, maintenance planning, recruitment planning or profit estimation.

Can Production Planning be used for EVERYTHING or is it incorrect? To say that a planning is not correct is to say that the formulas in the planning are not correct! That's not it? Then the information on which the planning is based is incorrect! But why? Are they not measured and verified? Are we referring here to information related to actual production capacity, employee efficiency, customer order accuracy, process or maintenance time, or scrap and repair information?

Everything has an unpredictable variability. Given this, coupled with a market hit by a pandemic, supply chain disruptions and fantastic price increases, we should be budgeting zero for special and urgent transport - it's not like everything is variable, but this indicator should be FIXED.

By discovering the impact that incorrect information has on planning, one can embark on the path of discovering the root causes for incorrect or incomplete budgeting and planning in Logistics, thus already taking the first steps in solving structural problems.