In April, Melissa and attended and exhibited at the NCBFAA’s Annual Conference in Tucson, Arizona.
The NCBFAA audience is a unique one; drawing owners and top managers, many of whom return year after year to see friends, meet with vendors and sit in three intense days of sessions covering the topics that impact our clients.
We took away the following from the crowd in attendance.
ACE has its challenges, but they aren’t insurmountable.
It’s here to stay for everyone and the focus on working in ACE is two-fold right now. First, the technical challenges of a new system where sometimes bugs crop up and our clients have to stop, wait for CBP to put through a fix and then try again. The hope is that CBP fixes the problem before the storage clock starts on the goods because freight locations show no mercy. Second, because of the way that information is going to be passed around between agencies in ACE, our clients are having to do a lot more data entry for things like PGA entries than they have in the past. This is causing them to have internal discussions about how to handle the additional workload and whether to attack it with existing staff or add headcount.
2016 Q1 was soft, Q2 shows strengthening to 2015 levels.
Obviously the ebb and flow of staffing is contingent upon the amount of work to be done. The first quarter of this year as the numbers bore out was softer than expected due to a decrease in exports from China and the strength of the US dollar impacted exports. However in our informal conversations with clients, Q2 and the rest of 2016 have early indications of strengthening and the prevailing sentiment is that staffing levels will be trending upwards through the rest of the year.
Horsing around: Your Derby Trifecta.
I fancy myself a bit of a horseman, but you won’t find me in Kentucky this weekend with all the beautiful people, some of whom have horses running at Churchill Downs. But I’ll give you my trifecta pick: Nyquist, Mo Tom and Outwork. I’ll see you at the window when it’s over.
