Interaction of freight modes : the automotive : consumer electronics : fashion retail industry (fashion retail industry)

• Main Author: Loke, Winnie.
• Other Authors: Teo Chee Chong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Maritime studies::Maritime management and business
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/16020
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Increased globalisation and global sourcing have forced businesses to focus on coordinating the use of different freight modes to improve responsiveness to customer demand. This raises the logistics service providers’ responsibility in offering transport management expertise, resulting in tighter competition in the logistics market. This report aims to investigate the interaction of freight modes by looking into how shippers’ business performance criteria affect the choice of freight mode and how freight modes complement and compete with each other. Three short product life-cycle and time-sensitive industries, the automotives, consumer electronics and fashion retail industries, were chosen for study of the interaction of freight mode, where a qualitative analysis for each industry were done in individual reports. The focus of this report is on the fashion retail industry. Main performance criteria affecting choice of freight mode were identified to be reliability, network coverage, cost and speed. The latter two factors were discovered to be influenced by the size and scope of shippers’ business. Ocean freight was also analysed to be the predominant transport used, marking a large portion of the market share that logistic arms of shipping lines have an advantage in. However, there is still a preference for other logistics service providers in the industry due to their relatively more established logistics expertise. For this, the approaches that shipping lines can take to face the stiff challenge faced were suggested. The report ends with a conclusion drawn from all three industries that analyse the link between the industries and the preferred choice of mode.