The Challenge
Solar projects don’t run on the same schedule as ocean freight. Containers of panels arrive from overseas on the shipping line’s timeline, but job sites can only take delivery when crews and equipment are ready, and they need panels in a specific sequence as the build progresses. Sending containers straight to the field means sites that aren’t ready to unload, panels arriving out of order, and costs piling up while freight sits and waits. For a manufacturer supplying multiple projects at once, that gap between when freight arrives and when it’s needed gets expensive fast.
What CarrierHawk Did
We gave the customer a home base in the middle of their project footprint. Containers come directly into CarrierHawk’s Oklahoma City warehouse, where our team devans, inventories and stores the panels. When a job site is ready, we build and dispatch loads with the right product, in the right order, at the time the site needs it, including next morning deliveries when the project schedule calls for it. The result is a single point of control. Instead of managing containers in transit and chasing site readiness, the customer has one partner handling the warehouse and the trucking under one roof.
The Results
- Over $200,000 in annual transportation savings for the manufacturer
- Panels delivered to job sites in Oklahoma and Texas in the sequence and on the schedule each project requires
- One partner managing devanning, storage and final mile delivery
The Takeaway
The cheapest truck isn’t always the cheapest solution. By pairing warehouse space with transportation in a central location, we turned an unpredictable import flow into a controlled, on demand supply line for the job site.
