If you don’t sleep, can you have nightmares?

During the last few weeks, and ever since the return of the workers from their Chinese New Year back to the factories, shipping from China to just about every country has been short of chaotic. The lack of availability of containers, the high traffic of vessels and the constant new export regulations by the Chinese government has caused many logistic departments and companies to go through very stressful times.

I want to share my experience with a particular shipment. Having dealt with these sort of conflicts for 16 years, I thought I had pretty much seen it all or at least have heard it all. I was wrong. I can write about this now as the problem was resolved but it took several days of sleepless nights, hundreds of calls, emails, skype video conferences and most importantly, the frustration of feeling absolutely helpless.

We had a particular promotion scheduled to be launched this week. Goods were manufactured with plenty of time, met all quality criteria and safety specifications so everything seemed to be going just fine, similar to 99% of the shipments we handle. When a promotion is urgent or semi-urgent, we normally would do an “express release” for the bill of lading and other documents that way, clients can clear their goods a lot faster and not have to wait for the original to be delivered to them.

In most of the cases, when we facilitate this procedure, it is done without a glitch. In some other cases, all it takes is for a worker on the transportation agency, at terminal, or at port to press the wrong button, or to fill incorrectly some sort of form, and then an original bill of lading is issued and/or released, making in some cases, “the express release” obsolete. In this very unlikely case, an email, or several emails, a phone call, or several phone calls, a letter, or several letters…(well, you get the point), could help resolve the situation. In this specific case, all of the above from us, from our forwarding agent, from destination, from all of the respective counterparts and from a lot of people involved did not accomplish anything. There was simply one person blocking this whole process without foundation. There was no particular reason why, but after a phone call that I made, it became a bit more apparent. While it was not as clear and as direct as I could have hoped for, an off-the-record request for some sort of compensation to “accelerate” or to oblige was requested and laid on the table.

Storage charges were eminent and things were growing more and more complicated with no positive outcome in the horizon. Certified letters, stamps, legalized documents, police reports to claim lost/stolen documents, ads on newspaper and publications, were among some of the many things that had to be done in the middle of the night and during early hours of the morning.

Let me emphasize once again the time difference between China and the US. Our counterpart in China was working during Chinese day time and during Chinese night time (US day time), and we were also working during our day time (night time in China) and during our night (China time) for over 100 hours straight. Our freight forwarder was doing the same as well. There is no doubt in my mind that if we did not do this, the goods would have not been cleared yet. In my mind, I have different theories of how and why this happened.

I was also positive now that there was another way out to avoid all of this hassle, and while it was not presented in such a way, there was a hint of what we had to do to make this happen in the phone conversation that I had previously. Nevertheless, we had to play by the rules; rules that had been changed and were being changed daily, and rules that most likely would change once again after we had fulfilled all necessary requests.

At the end, our perseverance prevailed and we were successful. We are very proud to have taken a stand and not given in. There is one thing that I learned as well. I learned that there are people that work just as hard as we do, willing to work day and night to keep a customer happy.

This is the most important thing that I learned though. I learned that doing what is right may lead to sleepless nights, but that sleepless nights doing what is right, are much better than having to endure sleepless nights due to a dirty conscience (oh, and that coffee is by not means overrated).

Tagged as: china traffic, corruption in shipping ports, logistics, promotions, shipping internationally