inating and sharing theft data among cargo owners,
insurers, and law enforcement. “All of the information
now exists, but because it’s managed in a fragmented fashion, it gives thieves too much lead time,” says Maurizio
Scrofani, CargoNet’s managing director.
Virtually all cargo insurers are already ISO members,
and large insurers such as the Chubb Group, Allianz, and
the Hanover Insurance Co. are charter members of
CargoNet. The insurance industry and ISO are footing the
bill for CargoNet’s start-up.
Shipper support
LG Electronics USA, the U.S. unit of the Korean conglomerate and a manufacturer and distributor of high-end
electronics equipment, is a strong supporter of CargoNet
and has advised its carriers to join, according to Robert
Auld, the division’s manager of transportation/cargo secu-rity/C-TPAT.
Auld says CargoNet’s infrastructure will enable the timely and relevant exchange of data, but only to the levels that
shippers are comfortable with. “We, like many shippers, are
very careful about the information we share,” he says.
Auld says cargo theft costs LG millions of dollars a year.
His division doesn’t manufacture in the United States but
operates seven distribution centers in the country. The
pressure points for theft, he says, are at its DCs and at customer locations, where trailers are pilfered before they
unload or are stolen while en route to the sites.
The problem got so bad, Auld says, that the company
removed all signage at its buildings so as not to call attention to itself and attract potential thieves.
Billion dollar problem
Cargo theft runs the gamut from ordinary hoodlums stealing goods from a parked trailer at a truck stop to sophisticated, well-financed, and organized groups heisting entire
trailer loads. The latter presents by far the biggest headache
for the supply chain, experts say. Unless the goods are
recovered within 90 minutes of their theft, there is virtually no chance of recovery because by then, the merchandise
has been transferred to another vehicle or warehouse, or
has been taken out of the country, according to experts.
In 2006, the FBI released data showing that as much as
$30 billion worth of goods are stolen in the United States
each year. The FBI estimates are still relied upon by those
in the industry. Based on the assumption that a truck trailer carries about $100,000 worth of goods, that high-end
figure of $30 billion translates into 822 truckloads at risk
each day, according to CargoNet estimates.
In its late January analysis, FreightWatch noted that
cargo theft reporting remains “sporadic,” indicating that
the reported numbers may significantly understate the
problem. ;
U.S. Chamber launches first-ever
project to measure transport
performance
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has launched a project that it says will be the first to measure the performance of the nation’s infrastructure and its impact on the U.S. economy. The chamber, the nation’s biggest business trade
group, will create so-called performance indexes, both
on a national level and state by state, to measure what
the group considers the four core sectors of U.S. infrastructure: transportation, energy, broadband, and
water. Each sector will have its own index, with the
results of each to be released separately. There will
also be a larger, blended index that will be released
annually, with the first scheduled for early 2011.
The goal of the project is to identify the issues in
each sector that are important to the chamber’s members and then measure how effectively, over time, the
sectors have performed to address those issues and if
they are keeping pace with the growth in overall gross
domestic product (GDP), according to Janet Kavinoky,
who is spearheading the project as the chamber’s
director, transportation infrastructure, and executive
director of the chamber’s Americans for Transportation
Mobility campaign.
While there has been no shortage of commentary
on the inadequacies of the nation’s infrastructure, the
chamber’s project is the first to apply an analytical formula to determine how well or poorly each sector is
performing, Kavinoky said. “We will try to show, in a
specific way, how [each sub-sector] is important to the
economy and to the business community,” she said in
an interview with DC VELOCITY.
Kavinoky said her team has completed the project’s
“exploratory” phase, which included reaching out to
the chamber’s members and identifying their chief
concerns with the nation’s infrastructure. The next
step, which will take several months, will be to leverage public data sources to measure and analyze how
well each sector of the infrastructure is performing to
meet the business community’s concerns, she said.
The chamber, which has 3 million members, has
budgeted $1 million to fund the project. The transportation sub-index is expected to be the first to be
completed and will serve as the project’s prototype,
according to Kavinoky. It is scheduled for release
around mid-summer, she said. ;
