TARGET CORPORATION

Running head: TARGET CORPORATION
How transportation processes has been improved in Target Corporation
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How transportation processes has been improved in Target Corporation
According to the director of domestic transportation operations of Target Corporation, Steve Carter, NTE has assisted the company to efficiently manage its logistics function, meet service requirements and streamline communication with vendors. NTE is the leader in e-transportation and this partnership was initiated in 2001 providing a technology-based solution for shipping operations. One way of improving transportation processes is to capitalize on modern internet-based technologies to develop an effective way of managing the inbound transportation activities (NTE.com. n.d). The company operates in a highly competitive retail environment where logistics is a major business operation. Apart from dealing in furniture, fashion and electronics, it also supplies food products in over 1,740 retail outlets distributed across 49 states. The supply chain consists of 22 distribution centers, several thousand vendors as well as consolidators and carriers.
For its inbound shipments, Target Corporation used to have a partially manual ready-to-ship process. Thousand of orders were being faxed by vendors every week and the company wanted to sort, optimize and assign to carriers. For optimization and consolidation, Target employees used to manually input shipments which would then be fed into the transportation management system (TMS) (Rowley, 2009). Due to low visibility to the shipments, the transportation decisions being made by the company led to increased costs of less-than-truckload (LTL) moves. There was increased growth in both business and marketplace demands and Target strived to increase value in its transportation network operations. The company aimed at improving its load factors, minimizing errors and data entry requirements, optimizing routing decisions, and dissemination timely shipment information to people in the supply chain (NTE.com. n.d). NTE was the best solution of tackling the challen...