Transportation Management: This question has two parts Background: You are a Sup

Question

Transportation Management: This question has two parts

Background: You are a Supplier Manager for John Deere, Inc., a company in Moline IL who manufactures large utility and specialty tractors and other farm machinery. This equipment is sold both domestically and globally through distributors. Domestic shipments initially are made from the Illinois facility. Global shipments and other domestic shipments are made to distributors from the Mid-west down to the Gulf of Mexico. You are teamed with the Logistics manager and several other company members from purchasing, manufacturing and engineering to develop a transportation strategy. The objective of this strategy is to improve delivery performance to the customers (farm machinery distributors) and to reduce overall transportation costs.

1-A) Describe a decision making framework that your team might use to develop this transportation strategy. This strategy should focus on ways to improve delivery to the customers (distributors). The framework should include recommended controls and metrics that will be used to monitor the transportation flow, major logistics issues to watch, and any relevant decision criteria the team will use in this model. Discuss how this framework might increase delivery performance. Finally discuss how this strategy is expected to reduce transportation costs.

1-B) As a Supplier Manager, identify what actions you can take to increase the likelihood that the strategy might actually improve delivery performance and reduce transportation costs, as you recommended above in Part 1-A)

Explanation / Answer

Transportation strategy is to find the providers who will offer the service levels required at a competitive price. It is better to match demand for your products to your supply which will help reduce transportation spending.opt for sales and operation planning strategy where all of the primary functions like Sales, Marketing, Product Management, Manufacturing, Warehousing, Procurement, Finance, Transportation, of the business come together as a team discuss and plan business activities. Here all teams understand a common set of goals such as customer satisfaction, profitabitlity and improved sales. The team should have a set of tools, KPIs and reports, to assist in regular checkups and notifications. The team should focus on why and how of improvement and eliminating the issue. All must be committed to leave behind what was haunting the company. So it is important to align the goals of logistics to the rest of the business. The transportation strategy is based on the corporate strategy. for example if your company sets the standard for quality, then the logistics goal is to have100% perfect orders and to do whatever it takes to correct any error and if corporate strategy is based on agility and the movement of goods faster than competitors, then logistics strategy is based on speed rather than cost. Potential problems lie within mismanaged warehouse processes, inadequately tracked fleets and their inventory, scattered inventory, lackluster transportation management .it is essential to maximize the potential of the workforce.

There should be a system that hat centralizes information and helps automate the supply chain which can help business reach its maximum potential with minimum investment of time, planning and solution implementation. Your company fleet can be whipped in shape through fleet management software, close eye on products can be kept through inventory management solutions, and every square foot of space can be maximized by improved warehouse management. thus it is the technology that are linking customers to shippers and sets a business ahead of its competitiors.todays technology is logistics cuts out the middle man and eliminates repetitive data entry, saving businesses money by cutting overhead costs and brings in more profit by allowing salespeople to secure more sales because they’re not wasting time with back-end order processing.

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