Transportation management - a brief note

A study plan on transportation management should cover Bentz (2003). This provides you with a broad and qualitative perspective of the subject. The main views of Bentz (2003) are that: (a)transportation management is a "competitive differentiator" for business enterprises and (b) there are operating value drivers that can improve gross profit, improve capital deployment and decrease operating costs, resulting in improved shareholder value.  Bentz maintains that transportation management softwares are required for companies to manage complex global supply chains in an increasingly demanding business environment.

Lucey (2002) offers a few quantitative techniques in transportation management, whose practical value needs to be reviewed within the broader subject context as described in Bentz (2003). My general impression is that the quantitative techniques offered sensitive our understanding of these techniques and their underlying logic but appear very simple to address this complex function of transportation management as depicted in Bentz (2003).

Related lecture note

Question for class discussion:

• How can corporate transportation arrangement make trade-off between customer servcie level and cost of operations?
• Could you suggest 2 ways of doing so.

  

References

1. Bentz, B.A. (2003) "Integrated transportation management" Chapter 2.6 in Gattorna, J.L., Ogulin, R. and Reynolds, M.W. (editors) Gower Handbook of Supply Chain Management, Gower.
2. Lucey, T. (2002) "Transportation: Chapter 20", Quantitative Techniques, 6th edition, Thomson.
3. Transportation management systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_management_system
4. On modes of transport: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_of_transport
5. Institute of Transport Management: http://www.itmworld.com/
6. The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (UK): http://www.ciltuk.org.uk/pages/home
7. A white paper on Transportation Management (pdf): http://www.aquamcg.com/DesktopModules/ListingOfEvents/UploadFile/633782680821466250AquaMCG_TMS_TechnologySeries.pdf
8. On intermodel freight transportation (pdf): http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/millennium/00061.pdf