As a facility manager, you work hard to ensure that everything moves as smoothly as possible. Unfortunately, some things are simply outside your control.

How would you handle a crisis that completely closed your normal delivery pathways? This is what the managers at a Nestle warehouse had to figure out on the fly when a water break flooded the frontage road that was used to access the docks.

There was an alternate route… an additional 4.5 miles on truck-safe roads, which of course Google Maps doesn’t account for. The leadership at the warehouse was on the phone for hours trying to contact carriers and reroute drivers.

It was a nightmare. But fortunately, there are ways to avoid it today.

What Could Happen at Your Facility?

Maybe you’re not on a frontage road, or there are easy-to-use alternatives to the main route drivers use to reach your docks. Great!

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan in advance how you’ll react if a major delivery disruption happens. It happens to everyone — either construction closes roads, or there’s an accident that blocks traffic for hours, or something else goes wrong.

How will drivers find out what to do? How much time — and money — will be lost in the process?

Planning ahead today can mean that you lose little to no time or money, even if there’s a significant disruption. It’s all in knowing how to communicate.

Making Driver-Facility Communication Easy

The last thing you want to do is stay at the warehouse late into the night trying to call dozens of carriers to reroute loads. Fortunately, there’s a much easier way to communicate — you can simply update your Dock411 profile with the new information.

Dock411 centralizes all of the information drivers need to know about your facility (and thousands of others). No matter how significant the travel disruption is at your warehouse, you can update a single source of information in just a few minutes and suddenly everyone knows exactly what they need to do.

You’ll save hours on the phone. You’ll avoid the extreme stress that seems to cost you years of your life in a single day. Instead, you’ll spend a few minutes updating an app, and voila! You’re done.

Dock411’s Transparency Mission

Our goal is not to get the entire world using our app (although we won’t stop you.) Instead, we want to increase the visibility into the shipping process for those who need it most — facilities and drivers.

We want to build the most complete, robust, and open directory of facility information in the industry so that it can be shared with drivers and facilities through a variety of technologies. We’d love to have you join us by claiming and updating your facility — and save yourself significant headaches in the process.

When you go into your facility tomorrow, your worst delivery nightmare has just happened. What will you do about it?