Revenue leakage: Inside a logistics company

To describe revenue leakage in a logistics company, it is important to know how such a company works in general terms.

A logistics company brings together transport and warehousing service providers with companies who need to distribute good. These service providers might be part of the logisitics company or third parties, but are always treated, by the billing department, as third parties. Both the clients and the service providers are based in different countries and many, many locations need to be served by the distribution network.
The clients need goods to be transported from a number of distribution centers to a large number of destinations. And, sometimes, from these destinations back to the distribution centers. Based on these needs, the client agrees with the logistics company what kind of services it needs and how much it is going to pay for those. A contract is drawn up with precise definitions of the activities contracted, as well as a table with rates (prices) for these activities, usually called rate cards. Typical activities include incoming phone calls at a call center, receipt of wares in the warehouse (inbound), preparation of wares for transportation (outbound) and the transportation of the wares to the destination. This transportation can happen by air, by truck, by courier, express, same day, next day, etc.
In the same way that there is a contract and a rate card between the clients and the logistics company, there are contracts and rate cards between the logistics company and the different service providers. Ideally, the activities are defined in the same way in both contracts, but that is not always the case. Naturally, there should be a difference in the rate cards of the clients and the providers, which is how the logistics company generates their revenue: clients pay a higher price for an activity than the price the logistics company pays to their service providers. In exchange, the logistics company maintains and operates the distribution network for the client.

Revenue leakage in the logistics business

My consulting job at DHL was to look for revenue leakages in the billing department of one of their units. During a reunion with my master thesis team, including the professor who counselled us (Prof. Schiereck, then at EBS, now TU Darmstadt) I discussed this shortly with them. From this discussion, my friend Boris, who is a lawyer as well as an MBA, sent me an e-mail analyzing revenue leakages from a point of view of a law office. I started to write him a response, but decided to use the blog for this, explaining a bit more about revenue leakages in a logistics company.
I will do so in a small series of articles in the next days. I think this is a good way to power up this blog again after a long pause.

First week at the new job, last post?

Please click on the image to read my text. It was an experiment and it didn't come out exaclty as planned. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Pulse Smartpen: quick and dirty review

**** (that's 4 stars out of 5)
Potentially life changing gadget

I believe the Pulse Smartpen is a fantastic platform for many day-to-day applications. The working principle of it just makes so much sense!
Fortunately, there is an SDK for external developers, unfortunately, file formats and communication standards don't seem to be open, but I am no software expert.

But back to the pen. Very well crafted, looks serious and professional. I can really use it in a board meeting. Although it is kind of bulkier than I expected, but maybe my expectations were too high. On the other hand, it is smaller than many highlighters in the market.

The screen is very good.

Interface quite intuitive everywhere: pen, software, notebook.

Writing recognition works fantastically well! Not only is the transferred "image" very detailed and looks natural, the software recognized my handwriting without any previous "training" when using the search function.

I do seem have to have problems transferring the audio sessions, which can be a deal breaker, but Customer Service has been very responsive so far and I hope to clear this soon.

All in all, I am very happy with the purchase, as long as the audio part starts working properly. I believe there is room for improvement and further development, especially in extra applications for it and am awaiting eagerly to beef up the functionality of my pen.

Written for: http://www.amazon.com/review/R374WV94NBJ5C8/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

An encounter in Brussels

Written on my phone on the plane coming to Brazil.

The Belgian who took over my apartment in Brussels is an ex-TV reporter who has once been to an extremely remote area in Brazil to cover a story about seringueiros, castanha-do-pará and indians trying to live in a sustainable way. He said that reality isn't as romantic as it sounds.
He has been living in Congo for years now, working with NGOs rebuilding bridges. More than 80. He told that you just had to free things up, and people would do the rest. He rebuilt the bridges and saw the business men coming, and thinks profit is a good thing to bring on development.
We talked about living with few things. Me with only what fits in a suitcase, him with what he had available in two years of living in the jungle. Less is more.
Another thing he told was that, in his experience, the best thng NGOs could do was to dissiminate knowledge.
Cool guy, this Jan. Good way to leave Brussels.

BusinessWeek's slideshow of Queen's School of Business

My colleague Manish sent us an interesting link to this slideshow at BusinessWeek:

Queen's School of Business Tour

Je suis arrivé au Brésil.

Temperature at 9 o' clock in the morning.


At my uncle's in the middle of São Paulo. Yes, it's true.


Tomorrow, the beach! See you in 2009.

Last day at DHL

I spent the last 3 months in Brussels, Belgium, working in the finance department of DHL Service Parts Logistics, in Vilvoorde.

If there is something that I am taking with me from this experience, besides what I learned about billing and invoicing, is the openness and friendliness that I found in this company.
I also have rarely seen such an international ambient, where each one was accepted because of their skills, regardless of origin. The number of countries represented in this office of 150 or so people certainly rivals what I have seen at my MBA term in Warwick, and that was already extreme!

It was a good time to put things into perspective and I am glad I came. Now I just have to pack and wait for the plane to Brazil tomorrow.

A good MBA reference site in Germany

I just received another newsletter from the http://www.mba-channel.com/ website. It is a relatively new website, started this year, and it has developed nicely.
What I like most in that website are the reports they write about different topics with a very critical view. From time to time they actually critic or put some school in check, which I think is very healthy.

One of the things that I found out during the MBA is that there is MBA reality and what I call the MBA "media hype". MBA schools are very clever in using the media for publicity. Of course. Positive reports go hand-in-hand with paid advertisements, as is usual in any industry. This gives MBA candidates a skewed impression of how an MBA develops, what one can expect of it, the job market reality afterwards. This gets reinforced by the fact that those owning an MBA title, like myself, will very seldomly critique the title and its institutions in a negative way. After all, we don't want to diminish the value of our degrees, do we? We have to care for our brand.
I continue to be extremely happy with my MBA experience, don't get me wrong. I met a lot of great people, visited interesting places, learned a lot, had lots of fun and, all going well, will double my salary in February.

Anyway, I just though of writing quickly to endorse the mba-channel.com website, which has also an English version.

Ah, they also tried to build an MBA community, which is commendable, but it hasn't really picked up yet. Maybe it is because they are offering features like blogs, photo albums, polls, etc., that people already use in other sites which are not MBA-specific. Maybe, instead of trying to create a whole new community environment, they might focus on getting content from elsewhere together, or focusing user interaction around their best features: their specialised stories and information.

Mannheim, Queen's and BusinessWeek

OK, so I checked out BusinessWeek's slides on the top non-US business schools, knowing very well that Queen's School of Business had grabbed the first place for the third time in a row (2004, 2006 and 2008). My surprise was to see the banner on the top of the page:

Mannheim is investing quite a lot in marketing. We have seen them on Facebook, I have seen them on the schedule leaflets on the ICE trains to Mannheim and now, BW.
I guess that all is good, after all, the better the Mannheim name is known in the business world, more valuable my Mannheim MBA degree gets.

The consultant's suitcase

I am looking for a new suitcase for next year. Being a management consultant living 5 days out of 7 in a hotel will certainly be a new routine for me. And, since it will be quite a tough routine, I am doing some research to get the basics right.
But it is not that easy to find out what I'll need, consultants don't seem to blog too much (with the exception of Paul Dunay, maybe, but social media is his speciality). And, surprisingly, luggage manufacturers don't seem to have models aimed at the 4+1 management consultants, which indicates that, just maybe, this is a niche which could be filled. At least it gives food for thought for the future of this blog.
I decided that, for a 5 day stay away from home, I would need the following:

• an extra suit (jacket and pair of trousers)
• 4 or 5 shirts
• at least one t-shirt, if not more (have to figure out if I should wear undershirts)
• 3 or 4 ties
• a pair of jeans for the evenings
• an extra pair of shoes, just in case
• underwear and socks
• one pullover, possibly
• a pair of shorts for sports. If the hotel has a pool, speedos
• toiletries

I used the tip to start with half of the suit jacket, fill the case with the rest and then flap the other half of the jacket over the other clothes. This should avoid getting the jacket creased across the middle, it makes sense.

Surprisingly enough, I found out that all of the items above fit in my carry-on (inflight) trolley. I wasn't very confident it would, but suspected it. That's why I did this small experiment. It worked.

Next week I'll take this trolley with me and look for a substitute. After all, althought it is still in good condition, its looks aren't what they once were. But it has served me well since 2004: China - Brazil - Germany - Brazil - Germany - Moscow - Germany - Brazil - Germany - England - US - Canada - Germany - Belgium. Not too bad for a case that cost me around 15 dollars, if I am not mistaken.
I am also talking to some of my consulting colleagues to see what their experiences are. What has worked for you?

Defeat of purpose

This is for my college media and design professor Luli Radfahrer, who posted a similar picture after a trip to Holland. The picture above comes from the same country, from Utrecht, and is a counter-example of good design. The flies, btw, are stickers, not originally placed by the manufacturer.

The MBS Facebook network

Thanks to Sascha, MBS FTMBA08, now there is a network for the Mannheim Business School on Facebook.

If you have an e-mail @mba-mannheim.com, you can join. 

Go to:

• Settings
• Networks
• Type "Mannheim Business School" in the "Newtork name:" field
• Fill in the details
• Click on "join network"
• Check your MBS e-mail for a confirmation link

That's it. 

BTW, I highly recommend you to send an e-mail to the IT guys and ask them to forward your MBS e-mail to your personal account. I use it with Gmail, it works like a charm.

Disqus comments

I have been reading about Disqus for some time now and tried to give it a shot.

Disqus is a comment system for blogs which should make commenting here more interesting.

Please, try it out and let me know what you think. From this post on, new posts will use Dis qus.

Blogger is back, will I be back too?

Since mid-August I had been locked out of blogger.com. Today, after almost a week without posting, I found out that my login at blogger.com works again. No idea why, no word from the not so nice people at blogger.com.

Funny that this happens now, because I have been thinking about this blog and its future. What is its purpose and who my audience is or should be.

When I first started blogging, it was a way to keep friends and family informed, and it was relatively private. I had a robots.txt file which prevented google to list it. It was written in Portuguese. And I passed the link to selected friends and family.

The MBA changed the aim of this blog. It certainly changed the audience I had in mind for it. I still wanted to keep family and friends informed. Luckily, they are all smart and well educated, so it was possible to change the language to English ;-) This was necessary to include three additional groups of readers: future MBA colleagues,  potential employers and future MBA candidates.

I am happy with the results. My MBA colleagues, their relatives and members of the 2009 class of the Mannheim MBA told me they read this. My family and friends certainly do. And, if your google "Fernando Bresslau" you find this blog followed by my LinkedIn and Xing profiles.

But soon I will be definitely employed. And I have been far from the MBA life for a couple of months already. So the audience of my blog will revert to what it was before: family and friends. With one big change: more of my friends now don't speak Portuguese, so the language will continue to be English.

I will certainly blog about my new job, the industry and the trends. But this will be on a blog separate from my personal blog. I could be blogging, starting in February 2009, about the chemical, automotive or wind power, depending where I'll land. And I would then blog with the interests of the company in mind. But this is the future, let's see.

I was also thinking about the declining frequency of my posts here. Sure, I have a project at DHL Brussels which keeps me busy 8 hours a day, job search and career decisions get another chunk of my attention and other beautiful things in life also captivate me, Brussels is an interesting city.

I certainly have transfered much of my broadcasting to a new tool, twitter. Actually, twitter linked to my Facebook status, through which I reach most of my MBA colleagues. Interestingly enough, Luli Radfharer, a professor at the arts and communication school at the University of São Paulo, whose courses I took in 2002 and 2003, twittered about an article stating that blogging was passé. I kept in touch with Luli over all these years through our blogs at first, and now through twitter. And I can see where Paul Boutin, the article's author, is going. He has good observations on how blogging has emerged and developed, and what we can expect from personal communication (or broadcasting) in the near future.

I will continue to blog. But I suggest you to follow me on twitter or on facebook. I will certainly be more present there.

And if this article is a bit confusing, please excuse me. It has been a long day, a long week, a long month and a long year. Can't wait to go to Brazil on Christmas and take the whole month of January off.

Harmonica Masters' Workshops 2008

It was great to be in Trossingen again and feel kind of at home once more. I was very fortunate to meet several of my friends, listen to great music and see the first snow of the season. It was a great weekend, even though I am really, really tired.

A familiar view

 

I took this picture when the ICE back from Stuttgart was passing exactly in front of my former apartment in Mannheim. Nothing special about the picture, but I just found it interesting to be suddenly in one of the trains that would bother me for months with their screetching noises...
BTW, the building to the left is a DHL building.

And thanks to Facebook updates...

I met these three wonderful girls for 20 minutes while changing train connections in Mannheim, tha was great! And this is maybe my favourite Mannheim photo ever! Don't you agree?

After the Delloite Minis...

I present you the PWC Minis!

At least they have Cooper in their name...

Added-value Graffiti