The Challenges of Today Logistic

The vigorousness of business globalization has activated the growth of logistic business. World wide entrepreneurs are seeking the faster, cheapest and more secure transportation and logistic ways to deliver their products to the users located in another side of the world. If you make a search in www.logisticsworld.com 's directory, there are 1,888 links displayed.
Since many companies had been setting up, urging to share portion of the cake, the core business of logistic has became more competitive and challenging. Here are some of the challenges I think are given the most impact to the shipping industry.

1. High Operation Cost due to Speculative Hike of Crude Oil.

The speculative hike of crude oil price in the world market had given a big impact to transportation cost. The price had once hit over USD 145/barrel, even though now is slightly dropped to USD 114/barrel. Most of the liner would try to absorb part of the burden to maitain competitive position. However, importers and exporters are still suffering from the additional cost.

2. Outstanding Services -- SPEED and Ability.

For certain consumer products, especially the electronic products, the new technology was introduced and published rapidly. Old models can be obsoleted very fast, means the life cycle of these products become very short. Thus, it is a NEED to minimize the transaction time of these products from manufacturers to the targeted market. This implemented to the raw materials also. Thus, in order to achieve the effectiveness of SPEED, logistic has became the main factor to look into. Those who is able provide the faster and cheapest solution, he will be the winner, sharing the large portion of the cake. Dare to remind that those intransit cargo either in the ocean or keeping in the port are devil operation to the exporters and importers. It's idle time. Therefore, an excel forwarder can minimize these idle time, and speed up the operation through below activities.

• Proper Channel of Communication and Information. The forwarder must be informative to all the shipping schedule from various liners in the desire region or route, and able to prepare or find the optimize schedule to their customer. Flexibility to reallocate if any unschedule interruption taken place. For example, vssel delay, vessel omit the requested port, bad weather, and etc.
• Custom clearance. Essential documents and good relationship with custom will help to accelerate the process. 1 or half day advance clearance would mean a lot to the importers.
• Prompt reaction to unpredictable issue like road accident, hijacking, incomplete documents, contract expire, etc. Take road accident as an example, if a container was falled and the quality of the cargo are assumed to be affected. Sending back to exporter for retesting and insurance claiming procedure need to be carried out. The prompt reaction to these activities could ensure the good cargo (after retesting) being released back to the market earlier.

3. Availability of Shipping Equipments

Equipments are the most valuable assets to liners. Hugh numbers of equipment need to be assigned from one destination to another. Insufficient or not proper managing your equipments might cause you losing your competitive position in fast moving logistic line. That's why an additional charges (demurrage charge) will incur to those failed to return the container. And most liners also unwilling to share their equipments with each other, especially for limited equipment like reefer container (container which equips with temperature control).

4. Intangible Cost

Some shipments were not fully utilized the container space due to order quantity limitation. The extra space inside the container will become a waste and these cost will be equally absorb by the cargo, and indirectly increased the shipping cost per piece of product. Thus, many exporters if possible will try to use smaller container ( 20' in stead of 40' ), or combine the orders in one shipment, or arrange with LCL (Loose Cargo Load) in stead of full load. For long run cost saving, exporters might would like to redesign and improve their packing method to maximize the usage of container space.

I believe there are more challenging factors out there that I didn't describe here. If you are in this line, welcome to comment.

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Fuel Price Reduced to RM2.55 Effective August 23

Most of the Malaysian didn't expect that the fuel price will be adjusted all in a sudden. Because, earlier news still announced that the new price will be announced by 31st.August, and take effective by 1st.September.
Petrol and diesel price will drop by between eight sen and 22 sen a litre from Saturday.
The price of RON97 petrol will be reduced by 15 sen to RM2.55 a litre from RM2.70, while RON92 would be 22 sen less at RM2.40, from RM2.62
The retail price of diesel would drop by eight sen to RM2.50 a litre.
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah ahmad Badawi announced the new prices in a statement after Friday's Cabinet meeting.
He said the prices were determined by taking into account the actual price from Aug 1 to 21 and the 30 sen per litre subsidy borne by the government while the subsidy for diesel, based on the new price, was 50 sen a litre.
"The cabinet decided to bring forward the enforcement date for adjustment of the new petrol price," he said

Urban Robin Hood from Las Vegas

An expert Blackjack player in Las Vegas wants to use his skills to help a selected poor family, settle all his/her debts through gambling table in one of the Casino in Las Vegas. This man has set up a webpage http://robinhood702.com recently to welcome the candidates submitting him a 1 to 3 minutes short script, explaining their difficulties, and reasons why they deserve to be the one.

Once you are the lucky one, Robin Hood 702 will provide an all-expense paid weekend, which includes a true high-roller suite with 24-Hour butler service at a posh Casino, show tickets to the hottest shows in town, spa appointments and meals in the city's finest restaurants. You will live like the high roller Robin Hood 702 is, then watch him win the money you need to become debt-free. He has made a guarantee that if you're selected, at least half of your bills will get paid no matter what happens at the Blackjack table. The whole event will be documented by the Fox News crews.

I'd discussed this offer with friends, but most of them suspected it is only another form of scam. They believed there must be some criminal motive hidden unrevealed. Hmmm... what can I said? Are we too fear for adventurous? Well, you might ask me back. How about you? Will you submit your script? Hmmm.... I think I will not. May be I'm one of them, fears to adventurous. But, very funny. When it really happen one day, then we will blame ourselves for not participating, losing such a golden opportunity. May be we are too conservative, without seeing any success example, we won't take any action to risk. Therefore, after the lucky one is born, we will most properly turning 180 degree and become very aggressive on searching another opportunity similar to this. Then, unfortunately it is very high chances that many criminals will take this opportunity to set up a trap, and we will easily fall into the real coming scams. (Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not here to convince you joining the event. As mentioned earlier, I won't participate too. Not because I'm debt-free, but just I'm not a good risk taker).

So, I would like to open this topic to you. What do you think? Is this a scam? Will you participate?


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Malaysia Fuel Price Reduce By 1st.September

Announced by Malaysia Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi on 20th.Aug., the Malaysia Government will announce the new fuel prices on Aug 31, which will take effect on Sept 1.

He said the new price would be based on the average fuel prices throughout the month of August and after deducting the 30-sen subsidy per litre.

"We are now monitoring the fuel price (in the international market) and I hope it will continue its downward trend," he said after chairing the 4th National Water Resources Council meeting at the parliament house today.

He said it was still too early to predict how far the prices of petrol and diesel could be lowered.
"It is still too early... We still have about ten days to go and I hope there will be no more increase in the price of fuel," he said.

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Confused sea turtles march into restaurant

Here's a very odd news I'd pasted to share about the confusion baby turtles,

ROME (Reuters) - About 60 newly hatched sea turtles lost their way during their ritual passage to the sea and marched into an Italian restaurant instead, a conservation worker said on Monday.
The baby turtles -- which ended up under the tables of startled diners at the beachside restaurant -- were probably thrown off track and lured by the eatery's bright lights, said Antonio Colucci, who was called to help rescue the group.
"They saw the artificial lights and took the wrong route," said Colucci, who works on a turtle monitoring project for the conservation group WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature).
"The diners were at first quite curious and then someone alerted the coastal authorities."
The stranded turtles, which had hatched on a beach in the southern Italian region of Calabria, were released into the sea.
Female sea turtles nest on beaches and their offspring instinctively head to the sea after hatching from their eggs.
(Reporting by Deepa Babington; editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Original posting in Yahoo News

Why French Ladies Won't Get Fat?

Maybe one answer to the French Paradox – why French women don’t get fat – is because they know when to stop eating. Perhaps they pay more attention to internal cues such as whether they feel full, and they pay less attention to the external cues that can lead them to overeat (like the level of soup in a bowl).
To see if this was true, we had 282 Parisians and Chicagoans fill out questionnaires asking them how they decided it was time to stop eating a meal. Parisians reported that they usually stopped eating when they no longer felt hungry. Not our Chicagoans. They stopped when they ran out of a beverage, or when the television show they were watching was over. Yet the heavier a person was – American or French – the more they focused on these external cues to tell them when to stop eating and the less they focused on whether they felt full.
Do you eat until you’re not hungry or until all the food is gone?


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5 Common Excuses for Not Exercising

Everybody know and understand well doing exercise is good for us, and we do agree that it should be parts of our daily activities. As initial, after inspired by muscle-man in magazine and TV, we do a lot of planning and searching for many useful guidance and information. We promised to ourselve that we will someday transform our body just like the model in the magazine. So, we bought many equipments, converted our store room, fixed the schedule, joint the gym house and appointed an experience instructor. In the first month, everything just went well.... but, second month, we were a bit shifted from our schedule... and slowly our equipments were laying with dust, store room turned back as it should be, schedule was blank or miss placed.... and our body still remain unshaped. We gave ourselve many excuses for not exercising.

Nike make a marvelous slogan - "Just Do It". Simple, but suums up a lot of things in our life. Even when we know something is good for us or that we should be getting our butt in gear, it can be extremely hard to motivate. We, as a species, have become masters of creating excuses. We find ways of procrastinating and getting out of so many seemingly basic ‘have tos’, ’shoulds’ and ‘need tos’. Unfortunately, the more often we make excuses, the easier it is to perpetuate. Creatures of habit, we get used to things, whether they are good for us or bad for us. A procrastinator myself, I thought it would be good to talk about excuses that are commonly used to get out of exercising. The five excuses below are pretty common, but I’m sure there are tons more out there to poke holes through.

1. I'm too busy recently, and I don't have time for exercise. May be this weekend, I could be free.
This is the absolute worst excuse, in deed very common. In fact, you should make time, in steed of delaying it. And, most properly by weekend, you would have another concrete reason for excuse. If you don’t prioritize exercise, you will never have enough time for it. Once you get used to making time, you’ll realize that you always have the time to fit in a workout. Whether it be squeezing in a brisk walk at lunch, scheduling ‘you time’ in your calendar or developing a daily routine that you can stick to, your time is yours. So use it wisely.

2. I'm too tired, I can't boost up any energy at all.
This is another very common excuses. When we finished our job, the pressure of dressing up and heading to gym was really killing. Most of the times, we would rationalize that missing one or two section would be still fine, or even several days in a row. Actually, this is not true. The reality is, that exercise can get you over ‘being tired’. Exercise is helpful with improving and maintaining stable energy levels throughout the day, regular sleep patterns and overall mood. Exercise also improves regularity and reduces incontinence, which can contribute to a feeling of sluggishness and being tired.

3. I don't feel well, I'm not fit for exercise today.
Well, if you are in the hospital, are excessively nauseous or have a fever, you probably shouldn’t be running a marathon. That said, a cold, allergies, a headache, menstrual pains or just ‘not feeling great’ shouldn’t stop you from breaking a sweat. Is a matter of fact, exercise can sometimes cure some of the most common ailments, including: hangovers and colds. Sweating, a form of detox, allows you to release toxins that are guilty of making you feel under the weather. So next time you have a sniffle, get out there and sweat your sniffles away.

4. It's too early or too late to do exercise.
When I realized I hated coming home to exercise, and could think of a million other things I’d rather do, I decided that I needed to buck up and get up in the morning to get in the workout. Yes, it was painful for two or three days, but now, I wouldn’t go back if you paid me. If you are a morning person, get up and get your exercise groove on in the AM. If you are a night owl, exercise at night (Although it is healthier to exercise in the morning, it is better to get the exercise in at night than to not get it in at all). Be sure, however, to leave a couple of hours in between your workout and going to bed so that you give your body enough ‘downtime’ to transition to sleep time.

5. I'm travelling, not convenient for exercising.
Granted, it can be more challenging to exercise when you are traveling, especially for business trip. But that doesn’t mean you can’t exercise. Here are some useful tips:

• If you are staying at a hotel, try to stay at one that has a fitness center or gym.
• If the hotel doesn’t have a gym, walk, jog or run outside. Make sure you bring appropriate clothing for the weather. And don’t forget your sneakers!!! Seriously, forgetting your workout clothes should not be another excuse.
• Tuck some fitness DVDs into your suitcase. Play them on your laptop and exercise in your room.

So, remember the Nike slogan "Just Do It", don't granted ourselves with those excuses no more.

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