Connie Mdladla learnt early on in life that one can either be disheartened by life or encouraged by it. There was a time when as a young girl she thought the odds were unreasonably stacked against her. Her father died when she was nine and she had four siblings, raised by a single mother who worked as a clerk. What was worse was she was born epileptic, and was prone to frequent attacks.
“I was living with epilepsy. It’s one of the most misunderstood conditions in medical science. It’s a neurological condition, but not mental retardation. People living with epilepsy can be productive and contributing members of society,” says Mdladla, who is today founder and Managing Director of Khaas Logistics, a freight-forwarding agency based in Johannesburg.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-29946 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Connie-Mdladla-1-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Connie-Mdladla-1-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Connie-Mdladla-1-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Connie-Mdladla-1-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Connie-Mdladla-1-683x1024.jpg 683w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Connie-Mdladla-1.jpg 682w" sizes="(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" />
Whatever Mdladla embarked on – marriage, motherhood and career, she refused to let her medical condition define who she was. In fact, it catalyzed her to strive for excellence.
“I have defied all the odds before me and gone on to successfully navigate some of the most challenging institutions of life,” she says. She derived strength from another woman: her mother.
“As a young girl, circumstances led me to believe that being a woman was a demerit. However, I was fortunate enough to have been raised by a wonderful mother who always reminded me that my strength lay within me and I should not be discouraged by things people say,” she says.
Her mother managed to raise capital to enrol her at Vista University for a BCom degree, but she had to drop out in her third year on account of her medical condition. Her mother was disappointed, but she maintains that this adversity actually marked the beginning of her logistics career.
“As women, we tend to feel like we need to be perfect before we can make a move. Instead, it is our imperfections and our willingness to take risks that allow us to grow and succeed,” she says.
She started out as a receptionist and later, worked as an inspections co-ordinator at logistics company ITS. She partnered with Imperial logistics to set up Mudeko Consultancy, going on to later found Khaas Logistics in 2008.
She had to garner capital and work from home as a director, receptionist, salesperson and errand-girl. To make matters worse, throughout this period, she faced increasing scepticism in a male-dominated industry.
“You also have to take risks, I’m taking risks every day of my life and I will do that moving forward,” she says.
Her first assignment was a 100-kilogram package she delivered from Edenvale to the airport in her Fiat Palio. Khaas Logistics has since grown to become a reputable company with  presence in major international cities. To upskill herself, she also enrolled for a Management Advancement Programme at Wits Business School in Johannesburg.
“Seventy percent of Khaas Logistics’ staff is women. This is a result of deliberate planning and implementation of a number of policies that not only place women in sustainable positions but also empower the organization. Women are more prudent than men. So it is the company’s empowerment policy to put women in important project management positions or to employ young women who will be trained for those positions.” Between 2011 and 2013, the company grew by 75%. Her success has brought many offers of consolidation that are now presenting other challenges.
“The biggest industry trends currently are mergers or small firms being swallowed up by big ones. The next five years will be critical in ensuring I am able to reject [those offers] so I can continue on this growth trajectory I am happy to be on,” she says.
Her logistics company is perhaps a metaphor for her own life: moving on, despite the odds.

The Risk-Taker Who Is Fighting Fit

BERNARD JOHNSON IS a trucker and a math problem. From his home in Columbia, S.C. the 49-year-old drives for Schneider National, one of the country’s largest freight haulers. Johnson pulls trailers filled with everything from TVs to toilet paper on as many as 25 trips a month for stretches of up to 500 miles.
The Green Bay, Wis. Company has to design the most efficient routes for Johnson and 13,000 other drivers. With diesel at $4 a gallon, this is not an equation it can afford to get wrong. “It’s like a big jigsaw puzzle,” says Ted Gifford, an operations research scientist at Schneider. At any given time the company has 10,000 trucks on the road, with another 33,000 trailers available and waiting to be picked up. Drivers are on the road between four days and three weeks at a time— alone and in pairs—and Schneider must get them back to their homes by a certain date. Drivers have to take breaks according to government regulations.
<div id="attachment_83" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-83" class="size-large wp-image-83" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO091211_002-1024x681.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="315" />Schneider’s Ted Gifford helped design a computer model that simulates operations.</div>
Their customers are only open during certain hours. “We want to avoid the situation where a driver may live in Alabama, and it’s time for him to go home, and he’s in Minnesota,” says Gifford. “And we don’t have any freight for him to get home, so he has to drive empty.” For most of its 76-year history Schneider, which grossed $3.1 billion last year, has relied on pilot projects to answer these key logistical questions. Whichever department was considering a policy change would carve out a group of 20 to 200 drivers, make them function as a separate business and test the results. The pilot projects cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” but results were often ambiguous. All too often a system that worked well for a sample of 20 drivers wouldn’t work when scaled up to the whole company. “You could spend more on the pilot than what you’d save making the policy change,” says John Nienow, a senior logistics engineer. To test another variable the only choice was to rerun the entire pilot and therefore double the cost.
In 2003 Schneider decided to invest in a fleet-wide “tactical planning simulator” that would use software algorithms to mimic the decision making of human dispatchers on an inhumanly large scale. Schneider looked to one of the leading practitioners of logistics simulation, Warren Powell, a professor of operations research and financial engineering at Princeton University. The algorithms that came out of Powell’s lab in the 1980s had changed the industry’s “less-than-truckload” segment (consisting of parcels and smaller freight) by mapping out a more efficient way to plan routes and using terminals that break down shipments.
One model, called SuperSPIN, had been embraced by Yellow and Ryder to survive the recessionary late 1980s. Powell’s software was also behind the launch of Roadway Package Systems, which later became FedEx Ground. What interested Schneider, a full-truckload carrier, was Powell’s work in the field of approximate dynamic programming, which is a way to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty. Schneider needed a model that could take into account the nonobvious and sometimes random variables that affect the efficiency of thousands of drivers over weeks of time and at a high level of detail. “Warren gave us a really nice hammer, and we had to take our problems and make them look like nails,” says Nienow.
A team of Schneider and Princeton engineers spent two years and “between $2 million and $5 million” developing software for the simulator, which lives on an eight-processor server in Green Bay. The simulator, which Schneider launched in mid-2005, pretends that it’s assigning freight and gathering orders based on a scenario posed to it by Schneider’s analysts. That could be something such as adding more drivers in Chicago, adding an hour in mandated break time for drivers or having a big customer change the location of its distribution center. The simulation runs forward in time for three weeks in order to approximate the value of having a truck and driver at a certain location at a certain time, and gets a first result. Then it runs backward in time to the “present”, reconciling the results with those that happened in the simulated future. Then it runs forward three weeks again and then backward, continuing to improve its estimate. It does that until it “converges” and starts to make only minor changes. For each three-week run, it makes hundreds of thousands of decisions. Gifford estimates that the simulator has helped Schnei- der save tens of millions of dollars. The simulator has, for example, allowed Schneider to justify price hikes to customers.
In 2008 a customer wanted to restrict the number of hours that Schneider could drop off goods. Schneider ran the simulator. “We showed that we could limit the hours but that doing so would cost us $600,000 more,” says Gifford. “We went back to them and said, ‘This is the impact of restricting your hours.’” The customer ultimately decided not to limit its hours. One of Schneider’s biggest challenges is maintaining its fleet size, since drivers often burn out and leave the company. Schneider regularly uses the simulator to determine how many jobs to offer and where it’s best to hire drivers. The model can determine the marginal value of hiring ten new drivers who live in central Illinois, say, based on the number of times that freight departs from the Midwest. In the future Schneider wants to use the simulator to decide which new business to pursue. The company currently employs three different fleets of drivers: long-haul truckers who live in one city but can travel all over the country, regional drivers who drive within a 500-mile radius of their homes, and dedicated fleets for specific customers.
A decisionto increase one of those fleets can affect the others: When Schneider creates a regional business, for example, it cannibalizes some work that the long-haul fleet is doing. “The thing that’s so powerful is that when someone presses us on the impact of different policy changes, we have the facts, we have the data. We can produce reports and analysis so that if someone else brought in their scientists, they would have to agree,” says Gifford. “The value is to be able to take these complex business opportunities and give them a good, solid analysis.”

Tag: Freight

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