Wal-Mart sometimes transports goods by air, sometimes by sea, and some goods are transported by truck and road. In China, Wal-Mart has successfully used road transportation, so how to reduce the cost of truck transportation is an important issue facing Wal-Mart's logistics management. To this end, they mainly take the following measures:
1. Wal-Mart uses trucks as large as possible, with containers about 16m long, which are longer or taller than container trucks. Wal-Mart fills the truck with products from the bottom of the carriage, which is very helpful to save costs.
Wal-Mart's vehicles are owned by itself, and the drivers are his employees. Wal-Mart's fleet has about 5,000 non-driver employees and more than 3,700 drivers. The motorcade can transport 7000-8000 kilometers per week.
Wal-Mart knows that truck transportation is dangerous and traffic accidents may occur. Therefore, for the transport fleet, ensuring safety is the most important link to save costs. Wal-Mart's slogan is "safety first, courtesy first", not "speed first". During transportation, truck drivers obey the traffic rules very much. Wal-Mart conducts regular surveys of the transport fleets on the expressway. The trucks are marked with company numbers. If drivers are found to be driving illegally, investigators can report them according to the number on the truck for punishment. Wal-Mart believes that truck accident-free means saving company expenses and minimizing logistics costs. Due to attaching great importance to safe driving, the transport fleet has created an accident-free record of 3 million kilometers.
3. Wal-Mart uses GPS to locate vehicles, so at any time, the dispatch center can know where these vehicles are, how far they are from the store, and how long it takes to get to the store. This estimate can be accurate to the hour. Wal-Mart knows where the trucks are and where the products are. It can improve the efficiency of the whole logistics system and help reduce the cost.
4. The logistics department of Wal-Mart chain stores works 24 hours a day, and can unload goods in time no matter day or night. In addition, Wal-Mart's transport fleet transports the goods from the departure point to the destination at night, so that the goods are collected in the afternoon, transported in different places at night, and delivered to the door the next morning, ensuring that the whole transport process can be completed within 15- 18 hours, which is an important measure for Wal-Mart to gain an advantage in speed.
5. After the products are transported to the shopping mall by Wal-Mart trucks, the shopping mall can completely unload them, without checking each product one by one, which can save a lot of time and energy, speed up the circulation process of Wal-Mart logistics, and thus reduce the cost. There is a very important premise here, that is, Wal-Mart's logistics system can ensure that the products obtained by the mall are exactly the same as the invoices.
6. Wal-Mart's transportation cost is lower than the supplier's own transportation cost, so manufacturers also use Wal-Mart trucks to transport goods, thus directly transporting products from the factory to the shopping mall, greatly saving the storage cost and transshipment cost in the product circulation process.
Wal-Mart's centralized distribution center organically combines the above measures to make the most economical and reasonable arrangements, so that Wal-Mart's transportation fleet can operate efficiently at the lowest cost. Of course, there are a lot of hardships and sweat behind these measures, and I believe that local enterprises in China can also get inspiration from them and create a Wal-Mart-style miracle.