At last week's Trans-Atlantic Maritime Conference, a chorus of speeches and PowerPoint presentations bemoaned port delays, trucking shortages and rate increases. John M. Bolte sang a different key.

Bolte is managing director of BDP North America, the Philadelphia logistics and transportation company. He agreed that port and trucking problems are real. But he said the attention they receive is out of proportion to their importance to the supply chain.

Or supply chains. Bolte said they're usually plural.

"A supply chain is not one thing," he said. "Every time you have an origin and destination, you have a supply chain. We work with DuPont, which has 287 supply chains. They differ by business unit and product. Some are supply chains within supply chains."

Understanding how they work - start to finish - is the key to controlling costs, he said. When a shipper's import container is stuck in port for an extra two days, it's an event that's noticed. But at that point, it's usually beyond the shipper's control.

"I guarantee you that's not where you lose the most time," Bolte said. "There's a tremendous amount of 'play' in supply chains, and a lot of it has to do with advance information. I think too much focus is on the physical side of the business - the equipment, the carriage of the cargo. In my experience, about 50 to 60 percent of delays are because of lack of advance information."

Bolte said the typical supply chain has 13 to 31 days of play, or
flexibility, in its schedule. An example is the required ship date. He said this often is poorly defined and can be adjusted to avoid problems farther down the chain.

And he said the physical side of transportation usually isn't the best place to seek lower costs. If transportation capacity is tight, shippers are going to pay more - there's no getting around it. But Bolte said shippers who study their supply chains and ensure good information flow can reduce total costs even when transportation rates are rising.

This is less a question of fancy software than of understanding how the supply chain works and communicating the information.

"What I think it boils down to is understanding your supply chain from end to end and making sure the facilitators have the information when they need it," he said. "You have to make sure that two or three days prior to each milestone, the proper information is delivered to the proper facilitator to make sure that your supply chain is on track.

"Port congestion certainly is an issue," Bolte said, "but a lot of times what happens is that it adds to the delay that you already incurred because of lack of advance visibility or advance information."

Integrated logistics offers opportunities for logistics companies such as BDP, but it also requires the right shipper. "You need a high-enough decision maker," Bolte said, "one who has the big picture in mind."

By: JOSEPH BONNEY