Multitude of trucking companies around the globe are focusing on Eco-friendly logistics. As customers started raising demands about Eco-friendlier logistics and more sustainable environment. Today, many trucking companies are starting to implement a wide variety of sustainable practices to become less dependent on fuel and reduce cost.

(a) United Parcel Service : It is known worldwide. UPS has over 2,200 alternative fuel vehicles. UPS also provides the opportunity to allow customers to paperless billing and invoices.

(b) J.B. Hunt : They are committed to delivering the safe, sustainable, and cost-effective transportation solutions. J.B. Hunt has been able to improve overall fuel efficiency, lower transportation costs by approximately 50 percent because of adopting new technology.

(c) United Van Lines : It is the largest moving company in Canada, and has won a number of awards as Canada’s 50 Best Managed Companies. Some of the green initiatives include recycling tires, having regular scheduled trailer and truck maintenance and looking to become a paperless company.

(d) Swift Transportation : It is a top trucking company throughout the United States offering a variety of solutions. The company uses all the latest technologies to decrease their carbon footprint and cost to offer eco-friendly logistics.

(e) Penske Logistics : This company always looks for optimized routes that will increase fuel efficiency. The trucking company is also involved with a number of recycling and green lighting programs.

(f) Atlas Van Lines : This is one of the premier residential and commercial moving truck companies around the United States. all trucks are equipped with on-board information systems that help truck drivers become more efficient with their fuel.

(g) FedEx : It for many years has continued to look for ways to make their fleet operations even more efficient than they already are. FedEx has continually looked to encourage other trucking companies to develop and purchase clean-technology enabled trucks.

(h) DHL : It is one of the leading logistics companies around the globe. As customers worldwide are increasingly demanding greener, faster and cheaper logistics. DHL has transformed its operational activity as per that.

(i) YRC Worldwide : One of the largest trucking services throughout the world. It is a previous winner of the Smart Way Environmental Excellence Award. Their operation is completely paperless and minimum fuel consumption.

(j) C&K Trucking : This has maintained focus on efficiency and technologies that will aid in reducing their miles per gallon. The company has installed software on trucks to measure efficiency metrics, retrofitted trucks, and created new speed management policies.

1. FedEx’s Holiday Season Performance Improves Significantly :

FedEx estimated a slight increase in shipping packages due to out-scene marketing In order to handle the 290 million packages, FedEx had taken measures which included increasing seasonal workers, using six-sided cameras to read package labels, investing in improving its network and capping deliveries of retailers.

According to a logistics software firm, FedEx achieved a 91% on-time delivery rate during Thanksgiving week, compared to 83% last year.

2. Change In Pricing Mechanism To Drive Revenue, Margins :

FedEx had announced that it would be applying dimensional weight pricing for all FedEx Ground packages. Instead of charging for a package simply based on its weight, FedEx will be charging its FedEx Ground customers on the basis of dimensional weight, which can be calculated by multiplying the length, breadth and height of the package, and then dividing by 166. The change in pricing mechanism could result in a 30-50% increase in package shipping costs.

3. Revised Fuel Surcharge Rates To Counter Impact Of Falling Fuel Prices :

In addition to increasing fuel surcharge rates, FedEx has also widened the range over which rates remain static. Under the revised rates, if fuel prices remain at their current levels, FedEx Ground’s fuel surcharge rates will increase by 1.5% and those of FedEx Express will increase by 1%. The difference in fuel surcharge becomes wider at lower prices. The higher rates and broader price ranges will allow FedEx to capture higher fuel surcharge revenue if fuel prices continue to decline.

Without fear of oversimplifying, the biggest challenges that sales people face are :

• how to qualify and follow up on leads and
• how to prioritize sales activities.

(a) Enjoy a safe storage space : SFA tool helps sales people to safely and centrally store their contacts, sales opportunities, activities and scheduled plans in one place, and have uninterrupted access to the database from multiple locations. Rest assured that your data won’t just get lost.

(b) Plan and time-manage like a pro : SFA tool helps sales people to optimize their daily schedules and prioritize tasks to make sure customers are not ignored and the key prospects are contacted on time. In fact, SFA tool allows sales people to spend more time with customers, which leads to more deals closed and a stronger customer base.

(c) Activity reports? – No brainer : SFA tool helps sales people to easily prepare their weekly or monthly reports for management. The process is automated and transparent, and takes just a few clicks to inform others about what sales are currently in progress.

(d) Stop surfing, start targeting : SFA tool helps sales people to segment data and identify valuable opportunities via criteria based selections. This prevents you from hours of cutting and pasting from various documents, or surfing in the disorganized lists of data.

(e) Stay up-to-date on what’s happening : SFA tool offers shared calendars, document templates and e-mail integration, uniting all team members and keeping everyone up-to-date. Sharing selling patterns and processes allows sales people to see what works best. SFA TOOL also increases communication between the sales force and sales management.

(f) Show up in time for the new sale : By tracking all communication with the customers, SFA tool helps sales people to know exactly when customers need to be contacted; for example, for product replacement, contract renewal, or for an upsell to a new product or service. This all increases your chances of closing a sale.

(g) Rationalize your sales moves : SFA tool helps streamline the entire sales cycle, which results in closing deals in your sales pipeline and helping everyone in the team to reach targets faster. Since order processing and preparing quotes is automated in SFA tool, sales teams are able to reduce production costs and increase sales revenue.

(h) Know what your customers really want : Since all the customer-related data is stored in SFA tool, it helps sales people to analyse the needs of customers and even anticipate their problems – all at the right time. All this increases customer satisfaction and ensures loyalty, as well as higher profit margins.

(i) Cut down on admin tasks : SFA tool releases the sales teams from the majority of admin tasks by reducing and even removing some of the repetitive actions that take a lot of time, but yield little profitability. SFA tool stores product and price details, triggers reminders for activities, and takes sales people through the sales pipeline step by step.

(j) Save money : Even though SFA tool systems are not cheap, they actually help you save your money! With sales people, it is the reduction of errors (for example, in orders or quotes) that SFA tool can help with. Effort and cost related to correcting those errors may be much higher. Finally, it also boils down to such trivial things as saving money on those cluttering and often vanishing Post-it notes, since every new information can be safely stored in the system.

FMCG industry has taken a rapid pace among growing industries and transforming local markets. Weather it is eatable or housekeeping stuffs, customer demands are raising looking towards more comfort day by day and it is obvious in a swiftly developing country.

Especially metro cities and urban areas are turning outto be most welcoming new demands and satisfying them as a result small firms, SME can take place in the game promptly. New innovation bringing new opportunity, emerging manufacturing industries, workers are getting skilled on a huge market coverage, skilled are getting more skilled but unfortunately industrialist, distributors, wholesalers have not kept an eye towards distribution channel. When high demand is being focused distribution channels are just required to satisfy the needs but improve the process of distribution.

Current Challenges In Distribution :

There is the impossibility of offering a homogeneous level of services throughout the country. This problem is especially relevant in the case of customers belonging to the organized FMCG distributors, the elevated requirements from a logistics point of view of this type of distribution (urban last-mile, many small deliveries, perishable products, frequent problems in the billing process) and the great volume of resources that are involved, mean that few manufacturers can offer a uniform level of services in all geographical zones.

On the other hand, the other structural problem identified in this type of distribution is the elevated costs associated with the order-delivery-payment cycle. It is estimated that these costs in the distributors channel are four times greater than in large-scale retail. These high costs in comparison with other logistics systems are due to multiple factors (very small orders, very frequent deliveries).

Strategically oriented companies realize that the key element of long-term success is increasing interdependence. These proactive companies understand that strong long-term profitability can be achieved by creating and promoting positive relationships, mutual benefit between members of distribution channel.