By Jon Kelly, President, Transport & Warehouse Division
How to Gain Flexibility, Visibility, and Control in Metals Shipping
Shipping metals is extremely difficult. The cargo is dense, heavy, and often in irregular shapes. It requires specialized equipment, strategically placed facilities, and specially designed infrastructure.
Among logistics professionals, this high level of difficulty makes status quo biases even harder to dislodge. When shippers have found a system for moving metals that works for them, they want to stick with it. The inflexibility of the cargo makes it hard for shippers to feel motivated to find better ways. Even if some efficiencies get left on the table, and costs are higher than they need to be, at least the unwieldy metals make it from A to B.
Recently, two forces have tested this state of affairs. First, perpetual disruptions have become ever day, comprising tariffs, regulatory changes, geopolitical conflicts, and more. This is not a time of great stability, in other words — it’s a time in which shippers must maximize their flexibility. On the other hand, new technological innovations in the wider world of shipping, including AI, have modernized several core operational procedures. Logistical teams are now asking, with increasing urgency, could there be a better way to ship metals?
Over the last several years, Odyssey Logistics has pioneered a new standard for moving metals that’s suited for this era of unpredictability and technological advancement. Our metals supply chain is based on five key principles that every shipper should be accounting for in their metals strategy.
1. Offering multimodal options
When greater flexibility is a priority, multimodal shipping becomes a major advantage. Diversifying your transportation mix to cover over-the-road trucking, rail, and intermodal allows you to respond to disruptions with greater agility. It also equips you with tighter control over every relevant variable in your shipment, allowing you to dial in the perfect mix of speed, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability for your shipments. Say a particular domestic shipment needs to be fast above all else. You might consider choosing trucking as your mode. However, if that shipment needs to cross a land border with Mexico, for example, it might be advisable to ship via rail or even an intermodal mix to avoid getting caught in customs for weeks. With a multimodal provider like Odyssey at your back, these options become possible.
2. Owning the right assets
Metals are highly specialized freight. Shipping them successfully requires having access to key infrastructure. Odyssey has made strategic investments into owning the necessary equipment and assets for smooth metals shipping. This includes everything from warehouses with reinforced concrete floors, to heavy-duty material handling equipment that can handle 85,000-pound coils, to trained operators that are skilled in handling metals and know how to do so safely. Odyssey also offers its signature load-and-roll-pallet technology, which makes weight distribution of heavy coils much easier, which in turn simplifies transloading and the entire shipping process.
3. Upholding safety and compliance
Safety and compliance also require special expertise. The weight and inherent danger associated with metal coils implicates several regulatory bodies and frameworks, from DOT, to OSHA, to the FMCSA. There are no shortcuts in learning how to navigate this web of regulation and getting even the slightest detail wrong can result in fines and slowdowns. In its decades of experience shipping metals, Odyssey has developed the broad base of knowledge needed to achieve compliance across the board.
4. Investing in technology
For specialized freight like metals, customers often want to-the-minute visibility—did the shipment leave the warehouse on time? What’s its status in customs? Who’s handling the final mile? Logistics providers with old tech stacks can’t always give answers to these questions, and they certainly can’t provide them in real-time. Frustrated shippers often find themselves logging into several different platforms just to get the information they need on a single shipment. To avoid this frustration and meet the need for increased visibility, Odyssey gives customers real-time tracking and inventory management capabilities to ensure that customers can keep track of their freight — all from a single platform.
Visibility, however, isn’t the only advantage technology offers; it can also shave off margins and find unseen efficiencies hiding in performance data. Odyssey’s tools equip customers with predictive analytics and performance metrics that help bring down cost pressures.
5. Listening to the customer
Every customer’s needs are different. Though the above captures several key aspects of Odyssey’s approach to shipping metals, at the heart of our strategy is always the needs of our customers. Each engagement begins with an operational assessment: what are your needs in shipping metals? What are your priorities? What are you trying to accomplish? These are detailed, important questions, and the answers will look radically different from customer to customer. Rather than filtering customer needs through a tightly defined playbook, the idea is to ask questions, and then provide as many options as possible.
Relieving the pressure on metal shippers
Metal shippers today face mounting pressure. Increased disruptions, technological innovation, and customer demands are putting time-honored playbooks to the test. Success now hinges on having more options, and deeper insight.
Odyssey’s approach to shipping metals is designed for this new reality. Our experience, infrastructure, and technologies help metal shippers break out of old constraints and find new ways of doing business that delight their customers. Perhaps, however, the most important piece of this approach is customer-centricity — by starting with the client and their needs, we can match even the most complex shipments with the very best options to get them there safely, quickly, and cost-effectively.
