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Companies can’t eliminate every risk, but asking and regularly revisiting these five questions can help you determine whether your plan holds. Transportation Contingency Planning: Five Questions Shippers Should Ask
Montreal for weeks, closing bridges and tunnels and disrupting the port that moves European containers into the Midwest. Cost and politics matter, too. Rate spikes and geopolitical shifts often signal trouble building before it hits.
By Mark McCullough CEO Gebrüder Weiss North America gw-world.com/us
T ransportation disruptions expose hidden dependencies. A border crossing gets congested. A highway closes for weather. Specialized equipment disappears from the market right when you need it. Companies can’t eliminate every risk, but they can keep one failure from taking down the whole network. In my experience, these five questions separate the plans that hold up from the ones that don’t.
What alternatives are already qualified?
A backup carrier or route only works if it has been tested before you need it. Move a small shipment through a second gateway, try a different carrier, or sample an alternate supplier early. When port congestion is a concern, test whether critical inventory can move by air. These trial runs surface capacity, documentation, or pricing problems early.
to act. A control tower with the right trigger mechanisms fixes that. The team running it watches for warning signs, from slowing production to bad weather to container imbalances, and flags what’s coming before it arrives. That’s the difference between forecasting and reacting, and it takes a partner who understands the plan well enough to pressure-test it. When did you last test the plan? How often you test depends on your reach and exposure to weather, geopolitics, and market swings. A tabletop exercise finds gaps on paper, but only a real shipment test shows whether a provider can perform. It can also show that a provider built for one disruption lacks equipment or coverage for another. These five questions won’t prevent the next disruption, but asking and revisiting them regularly determines whether your plan holds.
Where are the network’s critical points of dependency?
Which shipments need their own contingency plan?
Start by mapping the chokepoints. Look for heavy reliance on a single carrier, route, crossing, gateway, or mode. Cross-border freight through Laredo, Texas shows what happens when volume concentrates through too few crossings. Congestion and longer dwell times follow as growth outpaces capacity. Infrastructure fixes take years, so qualify alternate routes before congestion forces the issue. Some risks are harder to spot. Low water on the Panama Canal, limited rail equipment for oversized freight, and routes through wildfire or mudslide zones can all quietly become bottlenecks of their own. A single port can be its own chokepoint, too. A January 1998 ice storm knocked out power across
Not all freight carries the same risk. A component keeping an assembly line running needs a different plan than one for packaging with months of supply on hand. Weigh urgency, cargo value, inventory levels, and cash flow, then set trigger points. An early warning might justify extra containers. A serious disruption may call for a different carrier or crossing entirely.
How fast can you decide and communicate?
Before a disruption hits, define who has decision-making authority, what information is needed, and how issues get escalated. The message often stalls before it reaches whoever has the authority
20 Inbound Logistics • September 2026
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