Ditch Switching Short Sighted Shippers

How much should we invest to protect our assets? What are the odds an airline would ever need one of those ‘ditch switch’ thingies. And besides, if the plane hits the ground/water it’s likely just to break apart so why would anyone waste their precious captial dollars a some “Ditch Switch”?

Well, for U.S. Airways, it looks like the ‘Ditch Switch’ was a great investment. It closed the vents that prevented water from entering the fuselage via the ventilation ports and helped keep the passengers alive and their investment from sinking.

The most important lesson that we can glean from this is that forward thinking companies are consciously making decisions to spend money for something that does not make an immediate return or perhaps may not ever provide a ROI because they wanted to take every opportunity to protect their investment and their precious human cargo.

While most shippers make fixed investments with a certain amount of redundancy to safeguard their company equipment, software systems, and productivity; many shippers discount the redundancy value that first class 3PLs and carriers have placed in their processes that ensures the superior levels of service that their customers require and they have eliminated these providers strictly for cost considerations.

These shortsighted/cost obsessed shippers are willing to risk that they won’t lose customers as a result of service problems and that the good carriers that they have dismissed for cost can be regained easily when the economy turns around.

Good carriers and 3PLs need to throw the “Ditch Switch” on shippers that don’t respect their value proposition and focus on the ones that do.