March 29, 2024

A Logistics and Supply Chain Report

Florida Logistics and Supply Chain Report

Moving Florida Forward: New innovations, competition and demand are challenging the state's logistics and distribution systems. Here's how Florida's business and government leaders are meeting these challenges.

Teresa Barber | 2/1/2009

Focused on a New Space Race

For years, Florida has been the center of American space exploration. But with plans for commercial spaceports springing up from Alabama to Oklahoma to Thailand, a new space race is underway.

Space Florida President Steve Kohler has led a charge to seed commercialized space exploration in Florida. “We are not there yet, but we are consciously recognizing the importance of exploration and the Space Coast.”

A 2008 agreement to designate a commercial launch complex on Florida’s Space Coast signals the potential for high-growth economic clustering and development of commercial space exploration and research. Kohler says, “Everyone understands the need to deepen the supply chain and add to the value proposition.”

With almost 700 high-skilled employees in Ocala, Lockheed Martin relies on critical linkage across the U.S. and Florida. Brian O’Connor, chair of the Ocala/Marion County Economic Development Council and director of Ocala Operations for Lockheed Martin, says his company plans to expand in the community but notes, “The whole supply chain management piece is the largest risk we have in execution.”

“We receive over 1 million parts per month,” O’Connor says. Noting that parts arrive in Ocala from locations coast to coast throughout America, he drives home the point that logistics and supply chain connections are key for Florida’s future success.



Answering the Call for Green Efficiency

Perhaps the most visible sector in the state’s intermodal system, the trucking industry is particularly sensitive to the need to insulate operations costs against uncertain and spiking fuel prices while responding to the demand for greener practices.

Florida Trucking Association (FTA) President Mary Lou Rajchel has no shortage of examples of how FTA members are working to make Florida’s logistics and supply chain system cleaner and more efficient.

“We are all finding ways to learn how to be more green,” Rajchel says. Seventeen association members participate in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s SmartWay Transportation Partnership, working to lower greenhouse gas and other emissions by incorporating fuel- and cost-saving strategies into daily freight operations.

In 2007, the Council for Sustainable Florida awarded Sustainable Large Business Awards to two members of the FTA: Publix Super Markets for its “Get Into a Green Routine” program, and Florida Power and Light Co. for its Hybrid Utility Truck Working Group.

And it’s not just the trucking industry that’s investing in green.

CSX Transportation, the largest rail network in the eastern United States, was the first railroad to join the EPA’s Climate Leaders Program. The Jacksonville-based company has invested more than $1 billion in new, more fuel-efficient locomotives since 2000 and is now upgrading engines to save another 9.6 million gallons of fuel.

With a $2.5-million grant from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the Central Florida Regional Transportation Authority’s Lynx bus system will become the nation’s first transit agency to create blended biodiesel fuel for operating its public buses.

Last October, the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority announced that its Tri-Rail commuter trains will operate on bio-diesel fuel.

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