Articles

Trucking

Trends—August 2014
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Trends—August 2014

Speed Reading: The Same-Day Book Delivery Race is On Amazon had no sooner expanded same-day delivery for select products in six new cities—Baltimore, Dallas, Indianapolis, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.—than Google and Barnes & Noble teamed up to deliver books with similar speed. Using Google Shopping Express, bibliophiles in the Big Apple, west Los […]

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Mike Meehan
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Could New Fuel Efficiency Standards Lead to Transportation Cost Savings?

In February 2014, the Obama administration outlined plans for improving fuel efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions for American trucks. To support this effort, the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Transportation must set new standards for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. The rules, which the agencies must issue by March 2016, will have ripple […]

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Eric Meister
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SaaS TMS Facilitates Carrier Management

Q: How can shippers navigate today’s tight capacity market? A: For companies to have the assurance of consistent, competitively priced, service-oriented capacity through the ups and downs of the transportation marketplace, being a shipper of choice is imperative. Here are a few tips to get started: Go beyond rates. Best practice suggests taking a multi-tiered […]

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Dr. Matthew Waller
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Innovation in Business Processes from Northwest Arkansas

Northwest Arkansas is a hotbed for innovations in supply chain management, the effects of which span the globe. Although some argue that various aspects of these innovations started elsewhere, they have, at the very least, been perfected and rolled out broadly in Northwest Arkansas. Though these innovations have been in areas of data science and […]

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Scott Vanselous
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What Transportation Providers Gain From an Integrated TMS Platform

Transportation service providers with trucking assets have an edge with customers. Compared to their non-asset counterparts, they can directly control the equipment, drivers and facilities to ensure capacity and customer service, keeping commitments and adapting quickly to market change. Keeping pace with the demands of the marketplace has become increasingly complex, however. Few carriers operate […]

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Trends—May 2014
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Trends—May 2014

TOTO Plumbs the Benefits of Green To gain favor among ethically conscious customers, retailers and manufacturers continue to put a marketing spin on sustainability. Greenwashing has many shades. Often it surfaces in buzzwords such as eco-friendly and recycled. Sometimes it reveals itself as trust in a brand, or the type of ingredients found in a […]

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Donn Deffebach
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Plan Better Truck Routes: Long-range Itinerary Generation Enhances Operations

Not so long ago, route planning, fleet optimization, and driver allocation relied almost exclusively on the guile, instincts, and experience of operations managers and dispatch personnel. Long-range forecasting was theoretical at best. The tools used static data, and couldn’t handle the inevitable adjustments required by the dynamics of day-to-day operations. This is changing fast. While […]

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T.J. Coveyou
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How the Changing Chassis Market Affects Your Supply Chain

The change in marine chassis provisioning continues to be of concern to maritime shippers, thanks to a long-term trend of separating ocean transportation from inland logistics. That trend began in the mid-2000s, when carriers limited the inland destinations they would serve. As ocean carriers are disintermediated from the market, chassis users and providers will develop […]

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Jett McCandless
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Brokers Are Commoditizing LTL Carriers… And That’s a Good Thing

Much discussion in the transportation industry centers around how less-than-truckload (LTL) resellers, or brokers, are commoditizing the LTL carrier marketplace. While carriers don’t claim that brokers are packaging up their contracts and listing them on the Chicago Board of Trade to be exchanged like pork belly futures contracts, some do believe resellers are stripping the […]

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Building a Core Carrier Program

When developing a base of reliable core motor carriers, customer service and on-time success typically drive the selection process. But don’t overlook factors such as company stability and labor quality. Streamline your carrier program to a select few using the following tips. 1. Look beyond cost. When selecting partners, don’t focus solely on cost-cutting strategies. […]

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Trends—January 2014
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Trends—January 2014

Getting Demand Forecasting in Hand In the demand-driven logistics domain, forecasting is king. Companies that are best able to predict sputters and spikes, then react and execute against those signals, will gain a competitive advantage. But given today’s market uncertainty—the economy, consumer purchasing power and appetite for new products, sliding holiday seasonality, and emerging omni-channel […]

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