Export
Issue No. 41 - June/July 2008
Forward thinking
For most of his working life, logistic authority Ken Soloman has worked for freight forwarders or manufacturing exporters in UK and Australia. Ken came to Australia in 1974, made a name for himself in the field and now packages his expertise at the helm of logistics software specialist, Gallant Pty Ltd.
Ken is one of the Australian Institute of Export’s Heroes for 2008. An author, award-winning author and trainer and hands-on business advisor, Ken is well placed to warn about bottlenecks for new exporters.
Australia’s crowded transport network demands attention to detail and missing a link has consequences.
“The ever-increasing congestion - and price of fuel - for road traffic doesn’t help and can sometimes result in carriers missing booked time slots at the container terminal, or domestically at distribution centres,” Ken says.
“The imbalance of trade can also affect availability of containers and require costly repositioning of containers to avoid congestion at terminals. Not all services operate from Adelaide so exporters are required to road or rail consignments
via Melbourne.
“But the fundamental problem when companies first enter the international arena is that they ‘don’t know what they don’t know’ and it is a steep learning curve to discover all the information.”
Ken says the cost of failure is high: some contracts have “quite draconian” delay penalties, especially in large government contrac...
