Most North American ceramic and glass manufacturers and distributors are looking for ways to establish and grow their market share.

The part of a business where there can be a lot of low-hanging fruit is inbound transportation, particularly where vendors prepay and add freight to their invoice.

In many cases, an excellent service provider can probably perform this function better, faster and cheaper than manufacturers.

Here’s a simple tip for reducing your cost per hundred pounds: Just ship truckload quantities to all your customers and buy truckload quantities from all of your vendors. Problem solved.

Manufacturers often overlook supply chain metrics and analytics.