Dealing With Planners

Hey folks. So since I've been on this truck, I've experienced on numerous accounts where my mentor/co-driver has had confrontations with planners. On my first week out, we forfeited a 2600 mile contract because the planner had us rescue a load that wasn't even near us (we went to the shipper to pick it up and found out it was 400 miles away).

Almost every week, I would see this play out. Planners telling us they'll give us a long haul if we do them these under-the-gun runs that had a multitude of issues, only to tell us that the long haul contract that we had preplanned had been given to someone else. It's been very frustrating.

Since I'm still a rookie, I'm not as affected because anything more than $250/week is good in my books. But my mentor is especially affected because people depend on him to make a paycheck, so he has unleashed his frustration with dispatch and everyone, making it clear that he had been lied to by these planners. I feel that his confrontational nature has caused bigger rifts with planners and I've seen it first hand how a planner wouldn't give us a load just because of how he responded when asked if we could do a favor.

My question is, how do we go about dealing with planners? What can we do to prevent being screwed over and not have to be in a confrontational environment? Any advice will be useful. Thanks guys and ladies.

Hey there nomad girl and welcome to the reality world of trucking! I can't help you much in dealing with specific instances, but just remember that in the big picture companies do want to keep their equipment moving and generating revenue in order to stay profitable.

That being said, when I was with Roehl, Load Planners were the guys/gals that wore the black hats and the Fleet Managers/Dispatchers wore the white hats (at least according to the Fleet Managers). They always blamed the Load Planners every time a driver got tagged with a crappy (no refusal) load with Dispatchers claiming it was all out of their control. On the other hand, when the driver got a really good load, Fleet Managers would claim the credit for it saying they really went to bat for the driver in order to get that desired dispatch.

I came to believe that it was merely a good cop/bad cop scenario to mollify the drivers, lol. However, there, it seemed to me, the Load Planners really were the ones in control as far as load assignments were concerned and that the Fleet Managers functioned primarily as liasons/communicators between the drivers and the Load Planners. The LP were those shadowy people the drivers never saw or had direct communication with. I envisioned them holed up in a dark corner of a basement wearing green visors surrounded by banks of blinking computer monitors with no contact with the outside world, lol. Ok, so I have an over-active imagination.

My advice to you is to do your best to get along with and to develop a good relationship with your Dispatcher/Fleet Manager. It will only help you and make your work-life much more pleasant and productive. And, be prepared to get those occasional crappy loads and special requests. It will benefit you in the long run, but it's never fun while you are in the moment. As to any promises made to you about the next load being terrific to make up for the bad one you accepted, try to get it in writing via the Qualcomm or some other means, because Fleet Managers have notoriously short memory spans in this regard. Good luck to ya!

Being aggressive and confrontational with people, particularly people who kind of have you by the short-n-curlies and know it, is always going to cause problems. Their first reaction is always going to be to dig in their heels and not work to resolve the issue any way other than what works best for them.

That being said, without knowing more about the long-term history between your mentor and his dispatcher , and between your mentor and the planner(s) involved, it's kind of hard to say what to do here. If he has a good relationship with his dispatcher, but it's always one particular planner who likes to screw with him, then my advice would be to talk to his dispatcher--in a non-confrontational way--and let him or her know that this one person is making his life hell. If it's more than one, or even all, planners that are doing this, then he needs to have a (again, non-confrontational) word with whoever it is that oversees the load planners. If he's managed to raise the hackles of everybody involved with his bluster and bravado and BS, then there's really very little chance of getting this worked out, and you might want to think about finding a different mentor. If for no other reason than so you can see how things work when everybody isn't at each other's throats, but also because your livelihood is directly tied to his, and if he's being hamstrung so are you, which isn't fair to you.

Being aggressive and confrontational with people, particularly people who kind of have you by the short-n-curlies and know it, is always going to cause problems. Their first reaction is always going to be to dig in their heels and not work to resolve the issue any way other than what works best for them.

Exactly! Don`t do it! I had a decent Fleet manager who, I know, went to bat a couple times for my rookie butt. I was with him for just over a year and never had cross words, now, I am not saying I haven`t been mad enough to bite a nail in half, just that he never knew it. The only time he got a bit ill with me was on his last day as my FM , but, that had nothing to do with me. It was between him and my current FM and he needed a sounding board. I just smiled and said it has been a pleasure working with you and I appreciate everything you did for me this last year. He calmed down and that was that.

By the way, my FM now is also my load planner and works directly under corporate and it has been blissful. She is freakin awesome, but, then again I am working under different rules than all but about 40 other "specialty" drivers here.

For the first 8 months where I am working I went thru dispatchers like crazy. I think 4 in 6 months.

Somewhere my issues, some were not.

I was getting all kinds of terrible loads 150 miles, 200 miles, 500 miles, just anything came my way I got it.

Only one time in those eight months that I ever lose my temper at a dispatcher when he tried to tell me that the computer showed me getting somewhere and I could get it there and I was stuck in rush hour traffic.

I lost my cool and told him to send the computer drive the truck.

Other than that one time I never lost my cool. But I kept getting the bottom of the barrel with loads my paychecks were terrible.

Finally I got a great dispatcher. She fought for all of her drivers. She would get me a 1200 mile load and call me with the details. Make sure I could do it and understood it.

Over 50% of the time, as soon as she would leave and go home, the load planners would pull it off me and give me a 2 or 3 hundred mile load.

I had had enough. I didn't loose my temper, but I did go over their heads to their boss. Things changed. For 2 weeks.

After another month, again I went to a boss. Things changed. For a week.

I finally went to one of the bosses, boss and told him what was going on. He sent me out west, away from the mess.

As long as my new dispatcher has anything to do with it, things are good. But something has happened again. Came off home time two weeks ago.

And for some reason again, I am being kept mostly in the east.

Maybe it is not with all companies, but here where I work, it seems the load Planners control everything. And since we never see them, we are at their mercy.

Keep it safe out here, the life you save might be your own. The Blue Angel.

I wonder if there are any ex or current load planners that come on this site? Would be nice to get their side of things.