Transportation Management: This question has two parts

Background: You are a Supplier Manager for John Deere, Inc., a company in Moline IL who manufactures large utility and specialty tractors and other farm machinery. This equipment is sold both domestically and globally through distributors. Domestic shipments initially are made from the Illinois facility. Global shipments and other domestic shipments are made to distributors from the Mid-west down to the Gulf of Mexico. You are teamed with the Logistics manager and several other company members from purchasing, manufacturing and engineering to develop a transportation strategy. The objective of this strategy is to improve delivery performance to the customers (farm machinery distributors) and to reduce overall transportation costs.

1-A) Describe a decision making framework that your team might use to develop this transportation strategy. This strategy should focus on ways to improve delivery to the customers (distributors). The framework should include recommended controls and metrics that will be used to monitor the transportation flow, major logistics issues to watch, and any relevant decision criteria the team will use in this model. Discuss how this framework might increase delivery performance. Finally discuss how this strategy is expected to reduce transportation costs.

1-B) As a Supplier Manager, identify what actions you can take to increase the likelihood that the strategy might actually improve delivery performance and reduce transportation costs, as you recommended above in Part 1-A)