Transportation alternatives

Most transportation companies are committed to advancing the transportation needs and desires of the business community and local government. Nowadays new ways of alternative transportation are becoming popular, though not every town/city/country is prepared for them. And what makes the city/town ready for alternative transport?!
The answer is simple the city must have nice infrastructure allowing the citizens to use bicycles almost everywhere around. This of course is very useful. The amount of gas emissions will be lowered, the expenses for fuel will be lowered, possible decrease of traffic jams and most important eased public and commercial transport.

Should I implement RFID?

Many articles concerning RFID (radio frequency identification) have been written during the last couple of years, so it is not necessary to explain the nature of the technology or its different ways of use. The question raised in this article is whether to implement this technology into our business or not? If we look at the market trends we will find out that RFID is finding its way in the transportation and logistics business, but at a slow pace. There is no doubt that sooner or later everybody in the world of logistics will have to use RFID, or one of its future representatives to track goods, containers, trucks and ships back to the customers if they want to stay competitive, but is the right time now? It depends on each company's needs. If you own a big or middle ranked transportation company the best thing to do is to get your shipments tagged. Such company structures have bigger operating costs for organization and supply chain management, which can be lowered by implementing RFID technologies and applications, but even if you do you must not forget about the future and that all implementations of the RFID technology must be able to work with it's future releases, ofcourse part of the problem is the lack of standard so far. The same problem will eventually reduce the need of implementing such technology in smaller companies where the expenses for organization and tracking shipments and goods are not big. Eventually, if we consider longer periods of operation, RFID will pay back but if before that a new standard comes along with newer and better applications and all the equipment has to be bought again, then it will turn out that for smaller logistics operators the implementation of RFID technologies has been nothing but a considerable loss of money.

Bio-diesel the new fuel alternative!

According to the recent EU regulations the regular diesel fuel must be mixed with bio-diesel. That opens a whole new business opportunity for producing, selling and reselling bio-diesel and gives stable market for such production. Car and truck manufactures say that every car (with a diesel engine of course) built after 1992 is capable of using only bio-diesel, all that of course will bring the price of the fuel for the end customer down. That is also a great opportunity for farmers who are willing to produce plants that you can extract oil from, and sell it to the bio-diesel refineries.

Do I have to promote my transportation and logistics company online?!

The global trends are that the number of people who get online every day has increased with almost 30% percent compared to the same period last year. Many of these internet users are kids who are looking for fun (games, chat rooms), but the number of online users looking for business opportunities remains great. Many of these online users are potential customers for different areas of business. When speaking about transportation we must not forget the global world we are living in, people from all over the planet are looking for opportunities almost everywhere, which is forcing the logistics business to go global as well. Nowadays hundreds of deals are being made every day thanks to the internet, and showing your company to the rest of the world online is important even if your freight business is local.

Trucking prices will rise again

The trucking industry is warning that rising fuel costs are likely to put further upward pressure on the price of every day products. Еffects have already been felt at supermarket checkouts and that is not a surprise because almost everything sold to the public needs to be transported by truck at some stage.
Unfortunately no chances of stable price falling is expected, especially after the last conflict in the Middle East.

Reverse Auction for Transportation and Logistics

Traditionally, logistics and transportation are extremely important for successful operating of any company as well as the whole market at large. It is necessary to point out that, as a rule, the main goal of producers and sellers, as well as buyers, on the other hand, is to minimize costs for transportation and logistics and deliver goods to customers in possibly shorter terms. In the current situation, a variety of tools is used to achieve this goal. In this respect, it should be said that innovative technologies, especially IT, computing, Internet, etc., are playing increasingly more important role and are commonly used to facilitate transportation and logistics. As a result, auctions, using an electronic reverse auction platform, are growing to be popular and widely spread. First of all, it is necessary to point out that electronic reverse auctions have a lot of advantages compared to conventional auctions. Nonetheless, in order to better realize their efficiency, it is necessary to dwell upon the most significant ones. Primarily, it should be said that electronic reverse auctions may lead to a successful cooperation between producers of different goods to transport to various destinations and carriers. Naturally, it is logical to wonder what both producers and carriers benefit from such cooperation. It is worthy to note that this may lead to increasing of speed of transactions since producers receive not only the possibility to sell their goods but, at the same time, they have got a possibility to find a carrier that can deliver the goods to the destination. In such a way, two operations could be run simultaneously that seems to be extremely beneficial for sellers, i.e. producers. Furthermore, it is necessary to underline that the reverse auction provides producers with the possibility to choose from a large amount of carriers. In such a situation, the essential conditions for open and fair competition are created since producers can choose carriers on the basis of objective principles identical for all participants of the auction. On the other hand, carriers can supply their services to a large number of sellers and, consequently, can also easily find their potential customer. Moreover, the open competition stimulates carriers to the improvement of their services and it may also result in certain decrease of costs of transportation for producers. Also, it should be said that the implementation of new technologies, notably electronic reverse auctions leads to the implementation of high technologies in transportation and logistics at large. Moreover, it also opens new perspectives for reverse auctions since, being based on electronic platform, they can involve unprecedented amount of participants. Consequently, the probability that producers will find their clients and carrier, which will transport the goods to the destination at possibly lower costs, increases. Thus, taking into account all above mentioned, it is possible to conclude that the implementation of electronic reverse auctions leading to better cooperation between producers and carriers perfectly demonstrates the possibilities of new technologies applied to business at large and transportation and logistics in particular.