Part 2 Caselets

LOGISTICS MIX

1. Snowman Frozen Foods Ltd.—Providing One-Stop Logistics Solution in Cold Distribution
2. Transport Corporation of India—‘Indian Road Freight Index’: The Route Map for Tracking Freight Rates
3. Trans India Freight Services—Redefining Automotive Logistics Packaging

Snowman Frozen Foods Ltd.—Providing One-Stop Logistics Solution in Cold Distribution

Snowman Frozen Foods Ltd., based in Bangalore (India), is founded in 1997. Snowman was a result of a joint venture between Gateway Distriparks Ltd. of Singapore, Mitsubishi Corporation (global trading company) and Nichirei Logistics Group Inc (temperature-controlled logistics service provider) of Japan. Snowman Frozen Foods Ltd. is the first company in India which led to the setting up of frozen and chilled food distribution system on pan India basis. At a time when India’s domestic frozen and refrigerated foods scene is heating up, Snowman Frozen Foods Limited is well positioned to express finished products to the growing supermarket sector as well as to foodservice outlets from coast to coast. The services offered by the company are in the area of cold chain logistics such as transportation, storage, handling and retail distribution of frozen and chilled foods. The company’s vision is to be a ‘trendsetter in supply chain management by setting standards for customers’ satisfaction and continuously improving the process’. Also, the company’s mission is ‘to build long-term relationship with customers by improving efficiency of the distribution process, which could be done by providing most innovative and cost-effective logistic solutions of consistent quality and high standards.’

Snowman is equipped with modern Container Freight Stations (CFSs) and Inland Container Depot (ICD) for providing logistics solutions that fulfil the needs of the international trading community as well as the shipping industry for refrigerated food products.

Snowman acts as a single-window logistics solution provider offering an entire range of integrated logistics services including primary transportation, storage, inventory management, documentation and secondary transportation to the restaurants and institutions for inbound and outbound operations. In addition, Snowman has customer-centric products, good domain knowledge, dedicated fleet of vehicles, state-of-the-art technology and reliable and cost-effective solutions. The cold-storage system of Snowman maintains the air temperature for storage at —20°C for retaining the temperature of the products stored at — 18°C, which is the international standard for frozen food. The freezer storage has been designed for operation at —25°C having flexibility of temperatures for incoming materials up to — 15°C. The material storage arrangement comprises two deep racking standard systems, which can store materials on Euro pallets of size 1000 × 1200 × 1500 mm having vertically high arrangements. The pallet movement occurs with the help of battery-operated electric forklift reach truck, which is most suitable for lifting the material from fourth level and second depth of the rack. The loading and unloading of the materials from or into the refrigerated truck is done with the help of suitable dock levelers and dock shelters. The dock shelters airlock the trucks into the cold storage area while the dock leveller matches the floor level of the truck with that of the cold storage.

Snowman reefer vehicle ensures temperature reliability and prompt delivery. Snowman also ensures on-time delivery of frozen and chilled products to the main distribution cold storage and retail outlets from the processing plant. A well-trained and experienced team of drivers ensure that the product is transported at required temperature, ensuring food safety. The company also possesses a well-connected communication network, which provides immediate information to the client on the movement of goods. Moreover, a professional team of refrigeration operators, vehicle supervisors and truck maintenance mechanics make sure that the cold chain is never broken, ensuring temperature reliability and prompt delivery. The current fleet size of Snowman is 100 consisting of 6 ft to 24 ft Tata and Eicher trucks. These trucks are equipped with thermo-packing and carrier refrigeration units. Frozen food transportation system of Snowman covers around 120 cities in India and offers a fixed schedule operation.

The Snowman’s frozen stores have been built with the state-of-the-art technology by Huurre Group of Finland, which is a world leader in turnkey freezer store supply and management. The company’s stores are built specially to meet and maintain the international standards of temperature requirements and hygiene for frozen food products. Special facilities for separate storage of vegetarian and non-vegetarian products are also available. Process control systems that can maintain specific temperatures for various products are used to operate Snowman’s stores. The storage facilities also provide for a computer-controlled inventory management system and have palletized storage system, racked storage system and concept of sharing the cold store.

Snowman provides services to producers, importers and wholesalers of food products in making their products reach the retailers, hotels, caterers, etc. Snowman also has a perfect solution for a ‘factory-to-consumer’ supply chain management, with an ideal cold chain for storage of goods of stocks, having refrigerated trucks. This company is also equipped with a comprehensive MIS system, which helps in monitoring the collection of payment from the market and sales tax administration.

Snowman offers best storage and handling services and transportation and retail distribution of food products, which are temperature controlled. Snowman’s distribution warehouse, which has the ability to store items ranging from McCain foods’ potato products to Rich’s Whip Topping, is the southernmost link in a chain that connects the country from 16 locations. Goa, Pune and Mumbai on the west coast, Delhi in the north, and Kolkata, Vizag and Chennai on the east coast are some of the locations. The distribution network of Snowman is sufficient enough to cover 120 cities throughout the country. This allows the manufacturers and marketers of frozen food products to quickly reach all the major markets. Snowman services 3000 retailers in 5 cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Banglore, Chennai and Hyderabad. Some of the major clients include Mother Dairy, Amul Mars, Chocolate, Nilgiris Retail, Metro, Monday to Sunday, Domino’s Pizza, Pizza Hut, KFC and some 5 star Hotels. These businesses demand cent percent quality of service which Snowman is providing consistently.

Snowman has years of experience and expertise in handling fruits and vegetables. Snowman has over five fruits and vegetable processing centres at major fresh produce growing areas to cover the maximum geographical locations. These fruits and vegetable platforms are well equipped with stationary and mobile pre-coolers. The major activities of these platforms involve washing, sorting, grading, waxing, packing, weighing, ripening and quality testing. Snowman supports and maintains the cold chain from post-harvest till it reaches to the customer. Snowman’s IT-enabled information service has always resulted in innovative services and solutions in pre- and post-harvest fruits and vegetable transportation and processing. Snowman has created one of the world’s most performance driven, process efficient and people-friendly learning organizations, where the best and the brightest would work together to create a responsive, respectful and delightful work environment to make it a customer focused cold chain.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. What logistics services are offered by Snowman to its clients?
2. Discuss the various issues in managing a cold chain logistics.
3. How the cost-effectiveness and system efficiency can be achieved in cold chain?

Transport Corporation of India—‘Indian Road Freight Index’: The Route Map for Tracking Freight Rates

Transport Corporation of India (TCI) is known as one of the leading multimodal integrated supply chain solutions provider in India. TCI enjoys an extensive set up of1100 branch offices, 5700 workforce and over two lakh satisfied customers because of its customer-centric approach and world-class resources, which they have developed over past five decades. TCI believes in continuously upgrading and establishing innovation for industry benchmarks. TCI has also introduced a pioneering service by the name of Indian Road Freight Index (IRFI) in 1998, which can be defined as an index of weighted average lorry freight rates across different routes, similar to that of stock market index (see Figure 1). The freight rates are very dynamic in the existing overland lorry freight industry, dominated by small regional operators. The existing market is very sensitive to issues such as supply demand of trucks, seasonal fluctuation, fuel price hikes, off-loading of major shipment, etc. Lacks of comprehensive information regarding freight rates and the density of freight lorries on certain routes (route density) etc. are the major lacuna in the existing system. Therefore, prediction of the ongoing trend in the freight rates, the emerging trend in the lorry availability for a given period of time and analysis of the freight rates become very difficult. As a result, freight rates for different routes on required dates are not available readily, which in turn hampers the analysis of the freight rates and movement of the shipment for both local and national levels. Wide fluctuations of freight rates are caused because of lack of such comprehensive data, thereby leading to non-optimization of the freight space. The transport industry in India is highly fragmented, which makes the study of rates very difficult. No studies have been carried out on rates structure and therefore no databases are available on the rates and volume of material transported through each routes. TCI initiated this service to bring in benchmarks, best practices and standardization of supply chain solutions in this sector in India, based on global practices.

Fig. 1 RFI chart

RFI is a tool which helps in making comprehensive analysis of route-wise and date-wise freight trends, and also helps in forecasting the freight trends and freight rates for the near future.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. What is ‘Indian Road Freight Index’?
2. What is the utility of Road Freight Index in logistics operations?
3. How is RFI computed?

Trans India Freight Services—Redefining Automotive Logistics Packaging

Trans India Freight Services Pvt Ltd. is an Indian arm of Allcargo Global Logistics and has designed on 40 foot equivalent unit high-cube containers for transportation of cars. These containers will be moved primarily on rails. Currently around 98 per cent of cars’ transport operations are carried on by roadways and the remaining is by railways. The road sector for car transport is highly fragmented. When carrying automobiles on road the speed of the carrier is 20–40 km/hr and they do not travel at night. For example, Delhi to Mumbai takes six to nine days, which results in holding up of an inventory. The high-multiple handling results into 10 per cent of the cars getting damaged during transportation. With the new logistical packaging for car transportation on rail there will be significant reduction in transit times and in-transit damages to the cars. In the beginning the cost of transportation will be comparable to road transportation. However, with full-fledged operation, the cost will go down by 5 per cent and with double stacking the cost reduction will be 20 per cent. In the new packaging system, the cars are placed on to ‘trans-rak’, which is a simple, fixed-frame system. It is fitted into 20 ft, 40 ft, 45 ft, 53 ft and pallet wide ISO containers ensuring safe, simple and secure transportation of vehicles in containers (see Figure 2). It ensures total security in shipping cars directly from the factory to arrive in perfect condition inside and out at destination. The trans-rak are free from theft, dirt and weathering; no knocks, dents or scratches; no road, rail, roro or quayside handling, simple to operate for containerizing the cars with no special skills. Trans-rak adjusts for all car shapes and are lifted and lowered with a hand-held drill. This was not the first attempt to carry automobiles by rail. Indian Railways has tried it earlier. A few passenger trains were converted into car carriers. However, the venture was financially unviable because carriers did not get returned load. The success of this packaged transportation depends on the rail infrastructure with dedicated freight corridors.

Fig. 2 Trans-rak

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Explain the term ‘logistical packaging’ with regard to automobile industry.
2. What is the novel packaging solution offered by Trans India’ and why?
3. How is ‘trans-rak’ enhancing the performance of auto logistical system?