Friday, January 3, 2014

Update for week ending January 3, 2014

Happy New Year to all!

For some reason, it is much easier for me to write "2014" than "2013. Perhaps this is because I am so ready to be rid of 2013 from a personal and professional perspective. Don't get me wrong, alot of great things happened in 2013 but frustration over some things seemed to build up more during the year. Anyway, all of that has now been resolved and I plan to make 2014 the best year!

So, what's going on this week? Well, I decided to throw my thoughts out on the UPS holiday delivery mishap and that's now sitting on the blog. It was disheartening to hear of the undelivered packages. But, as I pointed out in the post, look towards alternatives such as the regional small package companies and the startups - that's where the future delivery models are.

I also wrote a couple of briefs for Ti's newsletters: The 2013 Top Ti briefs and one on the proposed Guangzhou - Hong Kong - Macao free trade zone. China's economy has experienced some declines and as such many regions/cities are looking at free trade zones as a means to stimulate growth for their prospective areas. How successful these will be remains to be seen. There are alot of questions still swirling around the country's first free trade zone in Shanghai which opened in September.

I'm also finishing up on the "GLM-Lite" and North America LM-Lite" reports. These are condensed versions of previous reports and will be posted on our portal later next week.

Also on my to-do list is a bit of number crunching for the Agility Emerging Markets paper and work on the Global Express and Small Parcel report which is scheduled for publication later in the month or first part of February.

You may be wondering how my "Same Day Delivery survey" is going? Well, it's not going very well and I'm thinking of letting it die a peaceful death. It must not be as big as I thought. That's ok, I still plan to incorporate it into an upcoming white paper - I just need to broaden the scope.

As for the blog, this year I plan to highlight as many logistics startups as possible. This is our industry's future and as I've written before, the ability to "think outside the box" is crucial in this new global environment. 

So, with that, it's back to work for me. Enjoy this first weekend of the new year and thank you so much for reading the blog.

Take care,

Cathy