Question

1. Identify significant transportation improvements and explain how they reduced shipping costs.

Answer 1

Transportation Improvement in various ways:

Introduction

The period between the end of the War of 1812 and the Civil War was a time of swift improvement in transportation, rapid growth of factories, and significant development of new technology to increase agricultural production. Americans moved with relative ease into new regions and soon produced an agricultural surplus that changed them from subsistence farmers into commercial producers. Manufacturing became an increasingly important sector of the economy and set the stage for rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century. The economic and technological developments brought important changes to American society.

Inland waterways. As settlers moved into the trans‐Appalachian region, they found the river systems crucial for exporting products to distant markets. Many streams were navigable, and they led to larger rivers such as the Tennessee and Cumberland, which in turn fed into the Ohio, which merged with the Mississippi River and flowed past the port of New Orleans. With roads unable to handle bulk traffic, farmers in Tennessee, Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and the Ohio Valley could take their harvest to an eastern city such as New York by riding down river to New Orleans and then taking a ship around Florida. The Mississippi River was thus a major means of transporting agricultural products from the Old Northwest to the East Coast, and its free navigation was vital to American interests.

The simplest means of river transport were rafts, but they were unstable, and rapids especially posed a serious danger. Flatboats could carry more cargo, providing an interior space for the storage of products and supplies. Real improvement, however, came with the keelboat. Its design made it more controllable, and a small crew using poles could propel a keelboat downstream at a fairly rapid rate. As many as one thousand keelboats a year headed down trans‐Appalachian tributaries and rivers to New Orleans in the early 1800s. Unfortunately, rafts, flatboats, and keelboats had one major disadvantages—they could make only a one‐way trip. After arriving in New Orleans, the rafts and flatboats were broken up and sold for wood. Poling upriver in a keelboat was possible, but a trip from New Orleans to Louisville, Kentucky, could take as long as four months, so return trips were usually over land. The Natchez Trace led travelers from north of New Orleans to Nashville. A map from the time would have shown the barest outline of roads radiating from New Orleans and Mobile, a city located about one hundred miles to the east. To call these byways “roads” is misleading though; they were often little more than trails, unsuitable for wagons in many places.

Two‐way river transportation came with the invention of the steamboat, or riverboat. A number of inventors had attempted to use steam engines to power boats, but the most successful design was created by Robert Fulton in 1807 and used on the Clermont. Fulton demonstrated the watercraft on the Hudson River and won a monopoly from the New York legislature to form a steamboat ferrying service between New York and New Jersey.

Transportation Improvement leads to reduce shipping cost by following various parameters:

reducing transportation logistics costs has always been the number one priority. There are several ways to optimize transportation costs, improve the supply chain procedures and save money for businesses.

1. Explore Shipping

The Less-than-truckload (LTL) shipment is an economical option for smaller weights. And if you can try to consolidate large shipments of different products or shipments for all buyers into one shipment, you would save cash using full load shipping (FTL).

2. CONSIDER WAREHOUSING SERVICES

If you are shipping a lot of goods from point A to point B, especially over a long distance, you can store products closer to your customers and thus drastically reduce transport costs.

You must first and foremost understand the security considerations. Make sure that the operation of your warehouse is safe - Be securely proactive. Do everything to avoid expensive injuries. Try as much as possible to avoid government fines.

If you have several security problems, the government can close down your operation. Get a safety manager who would be accountable for safety and organize ongoing safety training.

3. USE AUTOMATIC CONTAINER LOADING & UNLOADING SYSTEM TO REDUCE LABOUR COSTS

One of the best ways to reducing labour cost, avoid product damages, save costs of production and still be more productive is using our Automatic container loading & unloading system.

Analyze the reduction of labor for any warehouse operation. Each project should concentrate on the costs of labour. Labor management software systems are available which can help manage warehouse work.

Creating incentive programs for employees in the warehouse also work best. Try mobility in the warehouse in your four walls. Overhead reduced. And this increases overall individual productivity; less staff and less equipment needed.

4. USE PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE

If you want to cut costs on just about any equipment, preventive maintenance is used to reduce logistics costs - Emergency or breakdown maintenance don’t work. It can be expensive in working hours, customer support, fatal accidents (safety): the container is being unloaded, and the forklift dies.

5. FOCUS ON LOGISTICS COST REDUCTION

The simple best logistics cost reduction of supply chain tip is this: work together with suppliers to reduce costs. Sometimes suppliers can cover some direct logistics costs. Try to create a consortium of buyers (a buyer and their suppliers) to purchase the necessary logistics supplies (i.e., Transportation fuel) at a lower cost due to buying in larger quantities.

Start inviting suppliers with a structured agenda at your facility. One topic would be to analyze your goods and present logistics cost reduction ideas. The supplier is perhaps the expert in their field of expertise.

Suppliers can surely help by continuing to work with you in a win-win cost savings programme. Keep a part's function, but drastically reduce component costs, never jeopardize quality.

6. KEEP CUSTOMERS HAPPY

Keeping logistics support costs incredibly low per order involves customers to be happy (and this Fast-Track customer retention customers). One of the best supply chain cost reduction technique is exceeding customer expectations; companies can keep up and effectively manage the enormous burden of reducing logistics costs.

Because of this high correlation between client satisfaction and overall cost drastic reduction, customer service should also be assessed accordingly for changes in logistics costs.

I hope this will help you ?