What’s hype and what’s reality?

By Chris Coppersmith, President & CEO Target Logistics

Business, like fashion, runs in cycles To name just a few, there was the conglomerate phase of the nineteen seventies, the leveraged buy-out craze of the nineteen eighties Our just finished nineties saw a "back to basics" direction This latest trend seems to be continuing into the new millennium.

How many times do we read in the financial and business press that Company A is divesting itself of a number of corporate divisions. Or that Company B is disposing of certain assets The goal for this current "fashion is always the same, to return to our core business"

The back-to-basics express train shows no signs of slowing as we finally have reached the 21st century

But look down the tracks. The air freight industry seems to be traveling in the opposite direction. The air freight forwarder, in particular, seems to moving away from his core function, moving customers' cargoes from Point A to Point B. Rather, many forwarders are playing up their skills as "total logistics providers" offering "seamless supply chain management" for their customers' freight.

Who's out of step? The dozens of executives of various industries

who assert that only by reverting back to the manufacture and distribution of their basic products will their bottom line reflect blacker ink? Or is it those forwarders who maintain they can prosper only by expanding and diversifying their menu of services?

Like so many business questions, however, there are no absolute answers. Let me offer a few personal observations based on thirty years as a freight forwarder and customs broker.

Never once in three decades of serving the shipper and consignee, have I ever been asked by a customer if Target is a total logistics provider providing seamless supply chain management? But I cannot keep count of how many times I have been asked, either as a forwarder or customs broker at the L.E. Coppersmith firm, "what is your price" and "what kinds of service do you offer?"

Air cargo consultants may speak in cargo techno-babble but traffic managers and purchasing agents do not. They ask hard, direct questions, and demand hard, direct answers. I do not mean to imply, however, that our business is static and not in the throes of change. Forwarding and customs brokerage are far different businesses than they were twenty, or even ten years ago. It will continua to change and evolve.

Our business will not change so much in the way we physically move our customers' freight. Airplanes and trucks will remain the principal means to deliver cargo. The extensive changes involve technology and how we interact with customers, vendors, suppliers--and to an increasing extent with other forwarders.

The maxim that information about a shipment is as important as the shipment itself has become a clich' in the forwarding business. Like most clich's, there is a great deal of truth in this adage. How Target collects, tracks, retrieves and stores information, and we communicate that information to shippers and consignees, has become of paramount importance to our customers. Perhaps equally important but less well understood is the molding of new relationships among the different participants in our industry.

Forwarders always have been proud of their independence, the ability to "go it alone." This doctrine may have to be modified, however, as the dynamics of our business change. Adaptation to the new realities of our business in this new century will be of particular importance to the many mid-sized forwarders like Target, who still comprise the vital heart of our industry. Forging alliances between purely domestic and international forwarders will continue to expand. I believe this trend will accelerate in the years ahead. Once purely domestic shipments and once strictly international freight are being blurred as global economies increasingly mesh. Links between forwarders, customs brokers, truckers and airlines are becoming tighter and more durable.

These relationships are being driven by the f