COVID didn't invent your ops problems

It's tempting, in May, to blame the virus for every stupid thing in your operation. Missed scan? COVID. Partner went quiet? COVID. Your SOP was a PDF nobody owned? COVID. I was on a call this week that used the word like a blanket. I hung up and looked at the same holes we had last year, now with better lighting.

The pandemic is real. Lanes really did thin out. Indonesia really did change how the street works. Air really is a different market than it was in January. None of that invented your sloppy handover. It just stopped letting you hide it inside a normal week.

COVID didn't invent your ops problems. It removed the slack that made them look like personality.

What I already knew and didn't want to fund

Visibility that depended on a partner feeling like scanning. A last mile we had never described beyond a carrier name. One SOP pretending to cover markets that don't share a definition of delivered. Paperwork treated as admin. Waiting treated as dead air instead of a named part of the lane.

I wrote versions of this before anyone had heard of PSBB. The volume of pain is new. The shape isn't. When a flight cancelled in 2019, the teams that had a process for the wait were late and honest. The teams that only knew how to narrate movement went blank, then loud. Same now, more often.

Asset-light is a magnifier. We always lived in other people's buildings. When those buildings lose staff or lose a shift, we feel it immediately. That's the model. The model is only a crisis if you never built the process for a partner not behaving like your warehouse. Plenty of companies didn't. Plenty of companies are using 2020 as an alibi for 2018.

Slack was the real software

A normal week has slack. Extra aircraft. Extra riders. A depot that can absorb a lump. A customer who isn't home all day refreshing a tracker. Slack is what makes a weak process look adequate. Take the slack away and you don't discover a pandemic problem. You discover that "usually fine" was never a control.

I don't have a pretty lesson. The unpretty one is: fund the boring stuff while you still have slack, or fund it in a panic at worse rates. Exception ownership. Per-market SOPs. Document checks before tender. A customer sentence for sitting. Those were cheap in January compared to now. They're still cheaper than pretending.

People want new tools for this. A new tracker. A new war room. War rooms are useful if they decide. They are harmful if they become a place where the same missing scan gets discussed more eloquently. Process first. Then the tool, if the process needs one. That line hasn't changed. The year just made it ruder.

What I'm not giving the virus credit for

I'm not giving it credit for a partner we never measured. I'm not giving it credit for COD we never operationalised. I'm not giving it credit for a launch we did on a copied SOP because someone wanted a map. Those were choices. 2020 is a stress test. Stress tests reveal. They don't plant the wiring.

I will give it credit for speed. Decisions that should have taken a month now take an afternoon, because the alternative is a pile. That's the one gift. Use it to write the process you avoided, not to write a press note about resilience. Resilience is a word people use when they don't want to name the hole.

If it broke this year and it was already ugly last year, it isn't a COVID story. It's a delayed invoice for a process you never bought.

Do the same work, on purpose

Name the markets. Name the waits. Name the owner of a missed scan. Stop tendering on a shrug. Tell the customer the true clock. That's the list. It was the list in 2019. It's the list while the lanes are thin. It will be the list when they thicken again, and they will, and you will be tempted to reintroduce slack as a substitute for control. Don't.

If you're tired, that's fair. This year is heavy. Tired is not a reason to let "COVID" become the owner of every exception. Exceptions need a name that can be trained, measured, and fixed. A virus is not a manager. Put a human on it, and a file.