Drive Hard for Savings

Look at Transportation

By: Ben Cubitt

   Transportation is one area of the company that touches every link in your supply chain and accounts for the largest portion of your logistics budget.

      You can make a great start on improving your supply chain by optimizing your transportation operations.

      Transportation is the logistics in motion that connects your raw materials vendors to your plants, your component manufacturing centers to your finished goods assembly centers, your production/assembly points to your distribution centers (DCs) and your organization to your customers.

      The work you do here will dramatically improve your own link’s supply chain performance, and it will lay a solid foundation for future improvements in other operational areas. Gaining visibility into your transportation operations all the way from raw materials vendors to your customers’ receiving docks will open the door for communication, process development and management skills that can be leveraged in other areas like inventory management and procurement.

      There’s a bonus, too, because many of the more advanced supply chain visibility tools gaining rapid acceptance in the marketplace are either part of transportation or warehouse management suite of applications or have transportation management and optimization as their base functionality. This reinforces the fact that transportation is the critical bond to upstream and downstream links in your supply chain.

      Annual surveys from the Council of Logistics Management show that, on average, 10 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product is spent on logistics and that transportation is the biggest part — about 6 percent of sales for most companies and even more for some industries. Savings are going to be big because you’re beginning with ...

...Continued in the pages of Twin Plant News, Subscribe Today!