Mark Solomon joined DC VELOCITY as senior editor in August 2008, and was promoted to his current position on January 1, 2015. He has spent more than 30 years in the transportation, logistics and supply chain management fields as a journalist and public relations professional. From 1989 to 1994, he worked in Washington as a reporter for the Journal of Commerce, covering the aviation and trucking industries, the Department of Transportation, Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. Prior to that, he worked for Traffic World for seven years in a similar role. From 1994 to 2008, Mr. Solomon ran Media-Based Solutions, a public relations firm based in Atlanta. He graduated in 1978 with a B.A. in journalism from The American University in Washington, D.C.
A Seattle-based company has joined the U.S. small parcel fray by launching a service it says will, for the first time, enable small to mid-sized shippers to access low parcel rates that had previously been available only to large-scale users.
The company, called EquaShip, serves as the shipper's main point of contact and handles all billing, customer service, and IT issues. EquaShip doesn't operate vehicles or warehouses, instead turning to its transport partner, Blue Package Delivery LLC, to provide parcel pickup and the line-haul to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), where the parcels are introduced into the USPS system for the so-called last mile delivery. By law, USPS is required to serve every address in the United States.
The use of parcel consolidators relying on the low-cost USPS network for last-mile deliveries is considered the cheapest form of parcel delivery. The growing use of this shipping model gives merchants the financial latitude to offer customers free shipping on many online orders. It is believed that about half of all online transactions today include free shipping. In the first half of 2011, 62 percent of all e-commerce sites offered some type of free shipping, according to Ron Wiener, EquaShip's president and CEO.
The EquaShip service is designed for smaller e-commerce merchants who normally tender between one and 750 shipments a day, mostly merchandise purchased via the Internet, according to Wiener. These shippers historically lack the package density to qualify for deeply discounted parcel consolidation services, and must instead use the more expensive "retail" services offered by FedEx Corp., UPS Inc., and the U.S. Postal Service, Wiener said.
"EquaShip enables small to medium-sized shippers to ship through parcel consolidators who ordinarily only take on much larger customers," Wiener said. He added that shippers using EquaShip could save between 25 and 88 percent off retail rates for a three-pound parcel, the average weight of an e-commerce shipment.
According to Wiener, EquaShip's savings largely come from piggybacking on Blue's trucking network. Blue focuses almost exclusively on large online merchants such as Amazon.com and has no interest in directly serving the small to mid-sized customer segment, Wiener said. EquaShip procures available space on Blue's trucks, which need to move anyway. Through this arrangement, EquaShip adds package density to Blue's network and helps Blue fill trailerloads that might otherwise ride partially empty.
The need for parcel shipping alternatives, especially for small to mid-sized shippers, has grown more pronounced since DHL Express withdrew from the domestic U.S. market in January 2009. DHL was the low-priced provider, and its absence has emboldened the two remaining players, FedEx and UPS, to raise rates about 20 percent over the past three years.
The two giants have also imposed higher accessorial fees—add-on charges for services beyond the basic pickups and deliveries, and have made it more expensive for businesses to ship bulky, lightweight items under their "dimensional weight" pricing formulas. EquaShip has no accessorials, nor does it use dimensional weight pricing, Wiener says.
Even when DHL was in the U.S. market, though, smaller shippers operated at a pricing disadvantage because their relatively low volumes prevented them from gaining access to the best carrier discounts.
"There has long been a great chasm between the kind of shipping options that larger enterprise shippers have ... and the three limited and costlier options available to smaller shippers," said Rob Martinez, president and CEO of parcel consultancy ShipWare LLC. "EquaShip is coming in at the perfect time with new options that ideally suit the cost and transit time tradeoffs that are so critical to smaller shippers, especially those engaged in online commerce."
Martinez is an investor in EquaShip and sits on its board of directors.
Supply chain planning (SCP) leaders working on transformation efforts are focused on two major high-impact technology trends, including composite AI and supply chain data governance, according to a study from Gartner, Inc.
"SCP leaders are in the process of developing transformation roadmaps that will prioritize delivering on advanced decision intelligence and automated decision making," Eva Dawkins, Director Analyst in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice, said in a release. "Composite AI, which is the combined application of different AI techniques to improve learning efficiency, will drive the optimization and automation of many planning activities at scale, while supply chain data governance is the foundational key for digital transformation.”
Their pursuit of those roadmaps is often complicated by frequent disruptions and the rapid pace of technological innovation. But Gartner says those leaders can accelerate the realized value of technology investments by facilitating a shift from IT-led to business-led digital leadership, with SCP leaders taking ownership of multidisciplinary teams to advance business operations, channels and products.
“A sound data governance strategy supports advanced technologies, such as composite AI, while also facilitating collaboration throughout the supply chain technology ecosystem,” said Dawkins. “Without attention to data governance, SCP leaders will likely struggle to achieve their expected ROI on key technology investments.”
The British logistics robot vendor Dexory this week said it has raised $80 million in venture funding to support an expansion of its artificial intelligence (AI) powered features, grow its global team, and accelerate the deployment of its autonomous robots.
A “significant focus” continues to be on expanding across the U.S. market, where Dexory is live with customers in seven states and last month opened a U.S. headquarters in Nashville. The Series B will also enhance development and production facilities at its UK headquarters, the firm said.
The “series B” funding round was led by DTCP, with participation from Latitude Ventures, Wave-X and Bootstrap Europe, along with existing investors Atomico, Lakestar, Capnamic, and several angels from the logistics industry. With the close of the round, Dexory has now raised $120 million over the past three years.
Dexory says its product, DexoryView, provides real-time visibility across warehouses of any size through its autonomous mobile robots and AI. The rolling bots use sensor and image data and continuous data collection to perform rapid warehouse scans and create digital twins of warehouse spaces, allowing for optimized performance and future scenario simulations.
Originally announced in September, the move will allow Deutsche Bahn to “fully focus on restructuring the rail infrastructure in Germany and providing climate-friendly passenger and freight transport operations in Germany and Europe,” Werner Gatzer, Chairman of the DB Supervisory Board, said in a release.
For its purchase price, DSV gains an organization with around 72,700 employees at over 1,850 locations. The new owner says it plans to investment around one billion euros in coming years to promote additional growth in German operations. Together, DSV and Schenker will have a combined workforce of approximately 147,000 employees in more than 90 countries, earning pro forma revenue of approximately $43.3 billion (based on 2023 numbers), DSV said.
After removing that unit, Deutsche Bahn retains its core business called the “Systemverbund Bahn,” which includes passenger transport activities in Germany, rail freight activities, operational service units, and railroad infrastructure companies. The DB Group, headquartered in Berlin, employs around 340,000 people.
“We have set clear goals to structurally modernize Deutsche Bahn in the areas of infrastructure, operations and profitability and focus on the core business. The proceeds from the sale will significantly reduce DB’s debt and thus make an important contribution to the financial stability of the DB Group. At the same time, DB Schenker will gain a strong strategic owner in DSV,” Deutsche Bahn CEO Richard Lutz said in a release.
Transportation industry veteran Anne Reinke will become president & CEO of trade group the Intermodal Association of North America (IANA) at the end of the year, stepping into the position from her previous post leading third party logistics (3PL) trade group the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA), both organizations said today.
Meanwhile, TIA today announced that insider Christopher Burroughs would fill Reinke’s shoes as president & CEO. Burroughs has been with TIA for 13 years, most recently as its vice president of Government Affairs for the past six years, during which time he oversaw all legislative and regulatory efforts before Congress and the federal agencies.
Before her four years leading TIA, Reinke spent two years as Deputy Assistant Secretary with the U.S. Department of Transportation and 16 years with CSX Corporation.
Serious inland flooding and widespread power outages are likely to sweep across Florida and other Southeast states in coming days with the arrival of Hurricane Helene, which is now predicted to make landfall Thursday evening along Florida’s northwest coast as a major hurricane, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
While the most catastrophic landfall impact is expected in the sparsely-population Big Bend area of Florida, it’s not only sea-front cities that are at risk. Since Helene is an “unusually large storm,” its flooding, rainfall, and high winds won’t be limited only to the Gulf Coast, but are expected to travel hundreds of miles inland, the weather service said. Heavy rainfall is expected to begin in the region even before the storm comes ashore, and the wet conditions will continue to move northward into the southern Appalachians region through Friday, dumping storm total rainfall amounts of up to 18 inches. Specifically, the major flood risk includes the urban areas around Tallahassee, metro Atlanta, and western North Carolina.
In addition to its human toll, the storm could exert serious business impacts, according to the supply chain mapping and monitoring firm Resilinc. Those will be largely triggered by significant flooding, which could halt oil operations, force mandatory evacuations, restrict ports, and disrupt air traffic.
While the storm’s track is currently forecast to miss the critical ports of Miami and New Orleans, it could still hurt operations throughout the Southeast agricultural belt, which produces products like soybeans, cotton, peanuts, corn, and tobacco, according to Everstream Analytics.
That widespread footprint could also hinder supply chain and logistics flows along stretches of interstate highways I-10 and I-75 and on regional rail lines operated by Norfolk Southern and CSX. And Hurricane Helene could also likely impact business operations by unleashing power outages, deep flooding, and wind damage in northern Florida portions of Georgia, Everstream Analytics said.
Before the storm had even touched Florida soil, recovery efforts were already being launched by humanitarian aid group the American Logistics Aid Network (ALAN). In a statement on Wednesday, the group said it is urging residents in the storm's path across the Southeast to heed evacuation notices and safety advisories, and reminding members of the logistics community that their post-storm help could be needed soon. The group will continue to update its Disaster Micro-Site with Hurricane Helene resources and with requests for donated logistics assistance, most of which will start arriving within 24 to 72 hours after the storm’s initial landfall, ALAN said.