ABF offers LCL product from China

   The ABF Freight System has begun offering a less-than-containerload/less-than-trailerload service that combines NVOCC service to shippers importing from manufacturing centers in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan with inland delivery to final destination.
    Speaking this week in Atlanta at a press conference at the annual meeting of the National Industrial Transportation League, Roy Slagle, ABF senior vice president of sales and marketing, said the service was a compliment to the company’s already successful full-container NVOCC business, which has been around since 2006 and now offers service from about 10-12 locations in the Asia.
    One of ABF’s competitors, Con-way offers an NVOCC service in conjunction with the ocean container carrier APL, but ABF uses three carriers.
    “We find different carriers have different strengths from various ocean ports, so we are keeping ourselves nimble,” said Slagle, who is slated to succeed Wesley B. Kemp at the end of the year, as president and chief executive officer of ABF Freight, the largest subsidiary of Arkansas Best Corp.
    Slagle said ABF has been responding to changes in the supply chain by increasing its international offerings and “we now consider ourselves to be a global supply chain provider.”
    Those services include not only those of its NVOCC arm, but also services on the factory floor in Asia where it performs purchase order management, warehousing at 80 locations in the U.S., and trucking services in the U.S. where ABF has developed what he said is a “dual network.” of both longhaul and regional LTL services.
    “Seeing that customer shipping patterns were changing we saw a need to develop a more robust regional offering,” he noted.
    The company’s 10-K annual report noted that the regional market to be nearly twice as large as the long-haul market, and ABF’s share of the regional market is estimated to be less than half of its share of the long-haul market. That emphasis on regional delivery is in response to changing demand from many shippers who have reduced inventory and now need inventory to be restocked by suppliers more rapidly. As a result, many companies that in the past may have stocked inventory at only one or two distribution centers, replenish from multiple warehouses and have a greater need for regional LTL trucking.
    ABF says its ocean LTL features guaranteed weekly departures on a fixed day schedule, which enables ABF to expedite shipments up to 40% faster than traditional LCL sources.