Management Update

An Executive Summary of Industry News

By Staff -- Logistics Management, 11/1/2006

• Hear Ye! Hear Ye! The 2006 Logistics Management quiz is coming! While readers desperately seek capacity and fervently justify spikes in their freight budgets, LM will offer them a fun break from the daily grind. Our annual quiz will appear in the December issue, and will consist of 25 questions to test your knowledge of topics covered in our January 2006 through November 2006 issues. After reading the questions, contestants can visit logisticsmgmt.com to conduct any necessary research, and then answer the questions in an entry form on our website. Readers who answer all 25 questions correctly will be entered into a prize drawing. The reigning champion is Jim Stevens, senior project manager, supply chain operations for Starbucks Coffee. Will you be the one to dethrone Jim?
• ACE is in place at all New York land-border ports. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has finished installing the Automatic Commercial Environment (ACE) at all border crossings in New York. ACE is CBP’s commercial trade-processing system designed to improve border security and expedite legitimate trade. ACE allows CBP to collect electronic truck manifests; it also supports compliance with a federal law requiring advance electronic transmission of manifest data. The system is already in use at all southern land-border ports and at some along the northern border. With ACE as a platform, CBP will implement its mandatory e-manifest policy on a port-by-port basis in 2007. Notices of compliance dates will be published in the Federal Register at least 90 days prior to implementation. For details, go to www.cbp.gov.
• The trucking industry continues to fight the same old battles. According to 1,200 North American and European trucking executives who took part in a recent survey conducted by GE Capital Solutions, the biggest threats to their companies’ business performance are fuel costs (70 percent), the ongoing driver shortage (69 percent), and excessive regulation (40 percent). The survey’s results indicate that shipping costs and truck capacity are unlikely to measurably improve in the near future, GE Senior Analyst Serena Tse told LM. Respondents also said they planned to offset rising fuel expenses through such tactics as tightening supplier management; seeking “green” fuel and energy alternatives; purchasing more fuel-efficient vehicles; and leasing trucks to free up cash flow.
• Is TWIC up to snuff? Not yet, says a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the Transportation Security Administration’s biometric transportation-worker identification credential (TWIC) for port workers. The GAO made several recommendations based on interviews with Department of Homeland Security officials and industry stakeholders, TWIC test results, and visits to test sites. The top recommendation: TSA should ensure that the biometric card-reader technology is 100 percent effective before TWIC is fully implemented. The effectiveness of the technology is in question because most facilities that participated in testing did not use the biometric reader. Nevertheless, TSA has told several media outlets that it has no plans to conduct further tests on the technology. The report is available at www.gao.gov.
• How do your warehouse operations stack up? You can find out by joining LM’s Chief Editor, Michael Levans and the research team that conducted the 2006 Warehouse and DC Trends Study in a live webcast on Wednesday, November 29. Levans will be joined by Maida Napolitano and Don Derewecki of Gross & Associates, a consulting firm specializing in materials handling and logistics, for a detailed look at the results of this new, annual study highlighting emerging trends in distribution-center operations. Attendees will learn how warehouse managers are meeting higher customer-service expectations while attempting to function effectively at lower costs. An overview of the study’s findings begins with the article - How does your warehouse stack up? Give the summary a good read, and then go to logisticsmgmt.com/warehousestudy to register for the live event. And be ready to send in your questions to the research team.