DC Velocity - December 2015

inbound

One of our editors jumped into an Uber vehicle in Chicago recently and was reminded of the biggest challenge facing the trucking industry. The driver, a 50-year-old male, had just begun driving for the company. Before that, he spent decades driving a tractor-trailer. He got his commercial driver’s license while in the Army and made a living at it until recently. He said he left trucking because he was the single parent of a six-year-old daughter, who he wanted to see grow up. While he had reservations about his earnings potential with Uber, “it beats driving a truck,” he said.

By the way, anyone who wants to see how truckload spot pricing works should just try to hire an Uber in a densely populated city like Chicago during morning rush hour. At those times, the passenger faces a phenomenon known as “surge” pricing, where the fare can be 2. 5 times the normal off-peak charge. As a result, what should be an inexpensive fare to the destination can turn out to be quite costly. Yet if you need transportation, that’s the price you’ll pay.

Sound familiar, shippers?

No trucking uber alles

Heavy and oversized cargo specialist Volga-Dnepr Group is accustomed to moving awkward objects, such as cars, satellites, and industrial oil pumps. Bulky as they are, at least those objects stay put when workers strap them down inside the Russian airline’s AN-124-100 and IL-76TD-90VD heavy transport planes or Boeing

747 and Boeing 737 freighters.

That wasn’t the case, however, when the company was hired to move six rare Przewalski horses from a nature preserve in Montpellier, France, to the vast prairie steppes of Orenburg, Russia.

Biologists carefully secured each horse in a portable wooden stable for the six-hour flight, then accompanied the animals as they landed in Orenburg and completed their journey by truck.

“We took the utmost care of these special animals,” said Alexey Grebinyak, lead load planning specialist at AirBridgeCargo Airlines, which partnered with Volga-Dnepr Airlines on the job. “The stables were carefully installed and secured inside the cargo cabin, and ambient noises were minimized to ensure the horses After a long day of travel, the endangered horses arrived at their new home along the banks of the Ural River, about 930 miles southeast of Moscow. Biologists plan to release them into the wild and reintroduce the species in the Preduralskaya Steppe of the Orenburgsky Reserve.

Flying horses, courtesy of Volga-Dnepr

It’s hard to think of another industry that’s faced the kinds of challenges retailers have confronted in the past few years. And the reverberations are being felt deep within their operations. For example, the demands of e-commerce and omnichannel fulfillment as well as the growing risks associated with global sourcing have forced retailers to develop more flexible and responsive supply chains.

Discussions with retailers
led logistics industry expert Adrian Gonzalez
to produce an e-book that examines six
“supply chain disciplines,” areas in which
retailers must become proficient in order
to stay afloat in today’s fast-changing retail
environment. Developed by Gonzalez’s
firm, Adelante SCM, in collaboration with
third-party logistics company Legacy Supply
Chain Services, the e-book is titled “Keeping
Up with the Retail Consumer; 6 Supply
Chain Disciplines Retailers Must Master.”
In addition to the book, the authors have
developed a companion online tool that
lets retailers gauge how their own supply
chains measure up. Shippers can evaluate
more than 25 aspects of their supply chain’s
performance grouped into the six crucial
disciplines described in the e-book: supply
chain visibility, supply chain mapping and
visualization, supply chain risk manage-
ment, supply chain design, supply chain
business intelligence, and talent retention
and workplace culture development. The
tool provides a supply chain report card
along with specific recommendations on
how to improve performance and increase
efficiency.