DC Velocity - September 2015

4 DC VELOCITY SEPTEMBER 2015 www.dcvelocity.com inbound

Cycling fans who gather each July to watch the world-renowned Tour de France are treated to the spectacle of highly trained athletes hurtling down steep mountain roads and racing the clock in a grueling sprint to the finish line.

But few people know that logistics professionals are rushing nearly as fast to transport entire “villages” to each of the race’s 21 stages, a journey of some 2,087 miles.

With a dedicated fleet of nearly 50 trucks, Norbert Dentressangle SA, the French trucking and logistics company that became a unit of XPO Logistics in June, moved 22 tons of equipment each racing day. The time-sensitive loads included race support facilities, safety barriers, advertising structures, and a constant stream of merchandise for restocking along the race route.

Race organizer Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO) says it relies solely on XPO for transportation and logistics during the three-week event, which kicked off this year in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and ended at the famous finish line on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The race was first held in 1903; 2015 marks the 35th consecutive year that Norbert Dentressangle has managed logistics for the race.

On its website, Erie, Pa.-based freight transpor-
tation and warehousing firm Logistics Plus Inc.
describes itself as “the company that ‘gives a
s***’ (GAS) by handling supply chain challenges
from start to finish.”
The company recently had a chance to make
good on that claim when it landed a job coordi-
nating the overseas movement of some extreme-
ly awkward cargo—127 sections of 40-foot-
long gas pipes and two 190-foot, 28,000-pound
windmill blades.

Compounding the challenge was the distance involved: The pipes were shipped from a factory in Bremen, Germany, to Dundee, Mich., while the blades were transported from Bremen to Gratiot, Mich. Logistics Plus brokered the move, helping the shipper select the lowest-cost U.S. port and ground transportation options, and serving as liaison with the parties providing ocean transportation, forklift and crane services, and inspection services.

The voyage began when the colossal items were booked on a two-week ocean journey aboard the 411-foot Faglegracht, a Spliethoff Lines vessel out of Amsterdam. On July 6, the ship arrived at Michigan’s Port of Monroe, which is located on Lake Erie about 40 miles south of Detroit, making it the first European cargo liner to dock at the port since the 1960s.

Overall, the job demanded communication between seven companies on two continents, including organizations specializing in logistics, cranes and rigging, and cargo surveying.

After their ocean voyage, the enormous blades and pipes still faced the domestic leg of their journey. The team accomplished the complex move through a series of 60 full truckloads between the port and the final destinations.

I can’t believe I moved the
whole thing …
XPO keeps pace with the Tour de France
Encouraging high school girls to consider a career in the trans-
portation industry can be a tough sell in a sector dominated by
men nearing retirement age.

The industry group W TS International is taking on the challenge with an interactive mentoring program called Transportation YOU. Targeted at girls aged 13 to 18, the program introduces students to a wide variety of transportation careers and encourages them to take courses in science, technology, engineering, and math.

In June, the group hosted 18 female students and their mentors at its fourth annual DC Youth Summit in Washington, D.C. The five-day program included a visit with senior administrators at the Department of Transportation and meetings with some of the young women employed there.

Another stop on the trip was a course on data technologies and transportation investigations, hosted by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), better known as “the Metro.” Summit attendees also had the chance to participate in an academic challenge on transportation technology coordinated by researchers from Rutgers and Carnegie Mellon universities.