Overnite to be Renamed UPS Freight

According to a recent UPS press release, UPS will rename it’s recently acquired Overnite Transportation to UPS Freight effective May 2006.

Customers will begin seeing the new uniforms and newly branded trucks May 1. The rebranding includes a move to the UPS logo; new colors – a gray reminiscent of the Overnite gray combined with UPS’s signature brown, and the launch in May of a new Web site for shipping and tracking. The facilities and fleet, which includes 22,000 trailers, will be rebranded to UPS Freight over the course of several years. UPS Freight will continue to operate independently of the UPS package delivery network.

“We are taking the best of Overnite Transportation and Motor Cargo and melding it with UPS’s expertise and capabilities for the benefit of customers,” said Leo Suggs, Overnite’s CEO and president. “UPS is known for its technology, its operational expertise and its extensive service options and reliability. We are bringing those same features to our LTL customers. The UPS brand combined with t he talents and skills of our employees will increase our ability to attract new customers and creat e greater value for existing customers. It’s a potent combination.”

UPS acquired Overnite during August of 2005. Overnite and it’s subsidiary, Motor Cargo, provide UPS with LTL and FTL capabilities throughout the U.S with Motor Cargo primarily serving the Western United States.

You can access the complete press release here.

Container Rates – Up or Down?

Guest Column – Ehsan Ehsani from Supplychainer.com

Are Supply Chain IT systems so costly to run and maintain?

Ehsan Ehsani – supplychainer.com

Miya Knights from Computing has written an article recently, regarding the results of a survey between 400 European and American companies. In the survey 26 percent of the companies said that SCM solutions are so costly and if they invest large amounts of money on these solutions, they won’t have enough money to spend on the business itself.

Actually a critical question arises here: Should the managers invest in buying these solutions or not? I myself think, the answer depends on the size of the company and also a concept which I call SCM Readiness.

Let’s start with the Readiness. I think that achieving a level of maturity in implementing and using IT systems is a predecessor for buying a SCM solution. Otherwise, it may lead to more frustration and high costs. I will come back to this idea of maturity later in the next articles.

And about the size, yes, maybe it’s to costly for small businesses to run such solutions and they’d better use some simple soft wares instead.

So, it’s better to look at these issues too before buying these expensive complex packages. Maybe a proper PPT (People, Process & Technology) analysis will lead to better results. It seems that many companies just get into the hype of the SCM solutions with too narrow focus in mind. Instead, a proper Global Optimization Consideration (Effect across the supply chain) will help these companies in making a proper choice of the SCM solutions.

Ehsan Ehsani is the author of SupplyChainer.com . As a technology author and SCM expert, he has consulted and worked with various companies in operations side of the business.
He is also a regular contributor to Supply Chain Management Forum and Production & Operations Monthly(POM). Ehsan lives in Gothenburg, Sweden and can be reached through ehsan@creative-weblogging.com

Qinghai-Tibet Railway Cargo Transportation

Interesting tidbit for China logistics enthusiasts, the Qinghai – Tibet railway will begin transporting cargo next month. The railway system is the highest in the world at 5,000 meters and will link the capital of Tibet Autonomous Region and Xining, the capital city of the Qinghai province in northwest China.

The complete plan for transporting cargo has not been confirmed yet, however workers are gearing up for a successful launch. The new cargo service should provide a boost for Tibet’s economy.

Source: Xinhua News Agency

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