DC Velocity - January 2010

Imagine taking a cab to the airport. You sit in traffic for most of the way and, upon arrival, fork over most of the cash in your wallet to pay for the trip. As you walk into the terminal, you bump into five people from your town who also arrived by cab and realize, together, that you could have paid less (and burned less fuel) to ride a shared shuttle van.

Unlikely, you think? The same thing happens every
day across America as consumer goods make their
way to the warehouses of the country’s largest
retailers. Different products all going to the exact same location, but each
following its own individual line of supply and, in the process, driving up
costs, blocking our roads, and emitting noxious gases that choke our planet.

It’s time to retire this outdated model. The way to do that is collaborative distribution. That’s when CPG manufacturers store products in the same warehouse and ride in the same truck as products from other companies whose loads are destined for the same retailer warehouse. In this model, everyone saves, and the amount of energy used to transport the goods is substantially reduced. I’ve written an eBook on collaborative distribution that I hope you’ll read – www.kaneisable.com/eBook.

Kane and Collaborative Distribution

To position you to take advantage of this next wave of supply chain efficiency, Kane Is Able has established a collaborative distribution center for the Northeast at our Scranton, PA campus. Here we bring together small and mid-sized CPG companies to share warehouse space and overhead, consolidate shipments, and reduce their carbon footprint.

But 3PLs like Kane are only facilitators of a newer, collaborative model. Ultimately, to make collaboration work, the senior leadership of manufacturers and retailers must decide to operate differently. You must begin to view your product flow not as an individual stream – one of thousands – but as a small part of one huge river of product emptying into the same body of water.

It’s 2010 and there has never been a greater need to reduce supply chain costs and protect the only Earth we have. Collaborative distribution can do both. Let this be the decade of collaboration.