strengthening their hand
ground breakers
Material handling integrator Boston Rack International Inc. has
announced a merger with storage products maker Base Manufacturing, a
move the companies say makes them the first to combine the capabilities of
a full-service integrator and a storage systems manufacturer.
Following the merger, Boston Rack and Base will operate as subsidiaries
of a holding company, Elite Storage Solutions, to continue to take advantage of brand identities within their marketplaces.
The deal will expand the merged company’s sales force and resource base,
giving it a broader reach into the material handling industry that would be
difficult to attain as separate entities, Peter Murphy, Boston Rack’s founder
and president/CEO, said in a statement. “We felt the new combination
would offer the industry a value that exceeds all others,” he added. “In
today’s market, only the strong survive.”
—M.S.
C.H. Robinson has opened a new
office in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
The new office will specialize in air
and ocean transportation, distribution, consolidation, and value-added
services in Southeast Asia. C.H.
Robinson now has 18 offices in Asia.
FedEx Office (formerly FedEx
Kinkos) has opened a new distribution center in Camarillo, Calif. The
new facility was developed by Keogh
Consulting, with material handling
equipment supplied by Intelligrated.
maybe slower isn’t cheaper after all
This comes straight out of Transportation 101: A service that promises faster
transit times and precisely targeted deliveries will cost more than a slower
service that is not time-definite. This theory has been embraced by shippers of
high-value goods who would rather spend more on transportation in order to
save on the costs of carrying and storing inventory.
The shipping-inventory trade-off has long been used to compare the respective values of shipping goods by air and by water. But researchers at the Olin
Business School at Washington University in St. Louis took it a step further,
comparing day-definite, or expedited, full container load (FCL) ocean services
with traditional FCL services that take longer to arrive and are not day-definite.
They concluded that the total cost of shipping via day-definite FCL was less
than that for shipping via conventional container service—even though day-definite shipments reached the end user eight days faster, on average, than cargo
transported via traditional means.
Drs. Panos Kouvelis and Jian Li of the school’s Boeing Center for Technology,
Information, and Manufacturing compared the total annualized distribution
costs of 50 high-value 10,000-kilo containerized shipments moving from Hong
Kong to New York by air, by day-definite FCL, and by traditional FCL. They concluded that, on an annual basis, the total distribution cost of the time-definite
service was $1.076 million, versus nearly $1.2 million for the conventional FCL
service. The cost of shipping by air was nearly $2.6 million. All of the tabulations
included any fuel surcharges that were applicable at the time of the study.
Drs. Kouvelis and Li found the day-definite service’s higher shipping expense
was more than offset by the lower inventory-related costs associated with
faster product turns and the lessened need for expensive buffer inventory. The
cost savings of day-definite service were even more pronounced, the
researchers found, when they factored in penalties, retailers’ chargebacks for
late deliveries, or the need to use air freight along with a conventional FCL
move to avoid a late shipment or to minimize delays.
The study was commissioned by APL Logistics, which in 2006 launched with
Con-way Freight a day-definite less-than-container load (LCL) service called
OceanGuaranteed. In 2008, APL entered the day-definite FCL market with service linking the United States with four Chinese ports.
—M.S.
Odin Technologies, a company
that provides packaged RFID solutions, has announced the opening of
its new world headquarters and testing center in Ashburn, Va. Odin will
practice what it preaches at the new
facility: The company will use its own
packaged IT asset tracking solution to
tag all critical assets in the building.
Husqvarna Professional Products
Inc. has leased 90,000 square feet of
space from ProLogis in Reno,
Nevada. The company, which makes
power products for forestry and lawn
and garden care, will use the space
to distribute products to its West
Coast customers.
In addition, Jacobson Companies,
an Iowa-based third-party logistics
service provider, is relocating its
operations in the Reno area from
one ProLogis building to a larger,
182,000-square-foot ProLogis facility
at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center.
Austin, Texas, is home to the
newest facility of Aeronet, a global
logistics service provider. The new
operation complements the company’s existing facility in Texas near the
Dallas-Fort Worth International
Airport. Aeronet has more than 600
offices and partner locations
throughout the United States and 75
countries worldwide.
