inbound
Does this sound familiar? Your company makes a strategic change in its
distribution network. Sales and profits
increase as a result, but transportation
spending also increases. Even though
the change was a smart move overall,
you still have to explain why transportation spending is way over budget—
and you have to deliver that message to
someone who doesn’t have a transportation background.
It’s a common scenario, one that
logistics and transportation managers may not be sure how to handle.
That’s where CSCMP Explores… How
to Talk Transportation Budgets to NonTransportation Professionals can help.
The report, the latest edition of the
Council of Supply Chain Management
Professionals’ series of research publications, is designed to serve as a starting point for discussions about the
tradeoff between the expected benefits
of a business decision and potential
transportation cost increases—before
the decision is made.
Critical to any discussion about transportation budgets is an understanding
of the factors that drive transportation
costs, including fuel prices, customer
order profiles, and changes in carriers’
capacity availability. The report covers
metrics and software tools that help to
identify the drivers of transportation
spending, and explains how a transportation management system (TMS) can
assist in managing business processes,
data capture, execution, and analysis.
The CSCMP Explores… series is free
to CSCMP members. Each issue is writ-
ten by a leading expert and summariz-
es recent supply chain management
research, trends, and best practices.
For information about the series, go to
cscmp.org/member-benefits/explores.
More information about CSCMP can
be found at cscmp.org.
Talkin’ about
transportation budgets
In October, the Conveyor Equipment Manufacturers Association
(CEMA) announced that it would expand membership to all coun-
tries in the Americas. The group has committed significant resources
to welcoming prospective members outside of the United States and
Canada.
Over the next five years, CEMA will take steps to develop mem-
bership throughout the Americas. The organization also plans to
add Spanish-language capability on staff, develop a CEMA Spanish-
language website, make all CEMA technical standards available in
Spanish, publish its popular “Belt Book” in Spanish, and increase
membership from Mexico during that period.
Founded in 1933, CEMA is a trade association of 133 conveyor
manufacturers and engineering firms. It produces safety labels for all
types of conveyor equipment and publishes authoritative technical
manuals for conveyor design. For more information, go to www.
cemanet.org.
CEMA says ¡bienvenidos!
Pat Bayers likes to tell people he’s earned his stripes … literally.
The Midwest and Western regional manager for Applied Energy
Solutions, a manufacturer of lift truck battery chargers, has been in
the material handling industry for some 30 years. He’s also a long-
time motivational speaker and sales trainer. But what really qualifies
him to make that statement is what he does in his off hours: officiate
at Big Ten Conference football games.
Bayers was a two-time All-
American linebacker at Western
Illinois University. After college, he
Italy, where he also coached. Upon
his return to the U.S., he went to
work as a material handling equip-
ment sales rep while coaching at his
local high school and a Division III
college. His father’s chance meeting
with a Big Ten Conference official
at a wedding in 1990 led him to give officiating a try. He “fell in love
with it immediately,” he says. He started out as a referee at the high
school and Division III level and for the past 15 years has been a
Division I ref, including the last 10 years in the Big Ten Conference—
an experience he calls “an absolute honor.”
Bayers was kind enough to send us a television screenshot of him-
self flat on the ground at a Notre Dame game last year. “It shows
how important it is when you are knocked to the ground in a game
that you get up and continue on,” he told us. “It is the same in mate-
rial handling. I have been knocked down many times in material
handling. Some knocks have been harder than others. But I always
remember how important it is to get up and continue on.”
He gets a charge out of college football
