After four years in the doldrums, the specialized chemical tankers that ply the seas between the United States and Asia are set to generate bumper profits for the handful of companies that own and operate them.
There is frustration from the Freight Transport Association, which has complained that, whilst its members who operate road haulage fleets are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds retrofitting existing equipment to improve visibility in order to lessen the danger to cyclists, the pace of change from the relevant authorities to allow better designed heavy goods vehicles has been lamentably slow.
Total intermodal traffic grew in the third quarter of 2013 by 4.7 percent, year-over-year, attributable to gains across the board, according to the Intermodal Association of North America. Domestic container volume continued to lead intermodal growth, posting a year-over-year increase of 9.4 percent, and combined with a 1.2 percent boost in intermodal trailer volume for the same period, all domestic equipment experienced 7.6 percent year-over-year gains during the third quarter of 2013.
Clean Energy Fuels Corp. announced that it has placed a purchase contract on property where it hopes to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) fuel terminal in Jacksonville, Fla. This would be the first LNG facility on the Eastern seaboard to specifically supply LNG for the maritime, heavy-duty trucking and rail industries.
Use of RFID tags at the item level is upstaging case and pallet tagging among many retailers, says Tom O'Boyle, director of RFID at Barcoding Inc. O'Boyle explains the benefits derived from item-level tagging and looks at other innovative applications for RFID, including hybrid systems that mix active and passive tags.
Target is rolling out a service that allows customers to order products online and then pick them up at its stores as the discounter seeks to cater to tech-savvy, time-pressured customers.
Distribution centers are losing an average of nearly $390,000 every year due to mis-picks, according to a study conducted by Everett, Wash.-based Intermec Inc.
Grupo Pão-de-Açúcar (GPA) has found an RFID solution to a problem that previously affected both logistics and accounting for its Pão-de-Açúcar and Extra supermarket chains. The distribution of fish, as well as other products in its cold chain, presents significant challenges for the retailer. After all, fish do not have identical weights, and businesses work with average values per unit, resulting in differences between what theoretically was delivered to a store, what was really sold and the expected revenue generated by marketing.
Looking at safety statistics, it's easy to conclude that the loading dock is one of the most hazardous areas of your operations. A quarter of all accidents occur there. The majority of these accidents result in the dreaded back injury that, according to OHSA, ultimately ends up costing U.S. companies upwards of $80bn dollars annually.