Chicago's Leader in Warehousing and Distribution, Presents its Blog:

Neill Cartage and Warehouse is Chicago's premier full service logistics, warehousing, and distribution company.  Servicing the Midwest since 1946. 

The Union Pacific Railroad has opened its nearly $370 million Joliet Intermodal Terminal on 785 acres five miles south of Interstate 80 and seven miles east of Interstate 55.

Union Pacific chairman and CEO Jim Young said at Monday's opening that the new facility will increase the system's international and domestic container capacity while improving rail traffic efficiency throughout the Chicago area.

The terminal is designed to handle an annual capacity of 500,000 over-the-road trailers or oceangoing ship containers to enable Union Pacific to continue to pursue opportunities in the growing rail-truck and rail-ship markets.

Neill Cartage and Warehouse has been handing some of the Chicago warehousing and crossing-dock traffic that this terminal has created. Neill is also thinking about the possibility of opening a public warehouse in Elwood, to cut down on transportation cost. 

If you are looking for a reliable public warehouse or cross-dock facility in that area, please let us know at info@neillcartage.com.  

Neill Cartage and Warehouse is Chicago's premier full service logistics, warehousing, and distribution company.  Servicing the Midwest since 1946. 

It is important to select a public warehouse that is geographically located where transport accessibility is available. The transportation methods, such as road, rail, air, or ship should be located in near proximity to the warehouse in order to make it easy to distribute the needed products to their destinations. For a warehouse that is responsible for international exports, good locations would include a nearby airport or port.

The staff employed by at public warehouse is trained to prepare the goods for distribution to the necessary destination. This includes the inventory, packing, loading, and transporting of these materials. The steps vary according to the final location of the transport. For example, products that are going to a foreign place must be carefully packed with not only shipping invoices, but also customs declarations and necessary documentation. However, the shipping process is a lot less complex when dealing with national distribution, because the international regulations do not exist. Whatever the destination location, distribution is sometimes a 2 or 3 step process, which sometimes involves road and air or ship methods, and frequently all 3 means of transportation.

The processes of accurate inventory data are essential so that the goods being distributed and/ or transported will be executed precisely. If a public warehouse is not exact when recording inventory, then the distribution of the material may not be correct and the end results, pertaining to the customer, will be negative and/ or unsuccessful. All of the distribution costs are included in the contractual fees that the warehouse initially charges the company. In this way, the public warehouse does, indeed, have a say in the success of a company’s chain supply.

Truck drivers that distribute goods on a national/local level are employees of the warehouse and assume the responsibility for the delivering of the products in “A -1” condition. This is another instance where the insurance would kick in if the goods were damaged upon delivery.

Finally, it is good to remember that distribution is the last step that a public warehouse must complete in regard to its commitments, thus affecting the supply chain process of the business that has contracted its services. The responsibility that a public warehouse incurs is one of great magnitude, which illustrates the importance that a warehouse plays with regard to a company’s profits and/ or revenues.

Neill Cartage and Warehouse is Chicago's premier full service logistics, warehousing, and distribution company.  Servicing the Midwest since 1946. 

Firms in the truck transportation and warehousing industry provide a link between manufacturers and consumers. Businesses contract with trucking and warehousing companies to pick up, transport, store, and deliver a variety of goods. The industry includes general freight trucking, specialized freight trucking, and warehousing and storage.

General freight trucking uses motor vehicles, such as trucks and tractor-trailers, to provide over-the-road transportation of general commodities. This industry segment is further subdivided based on distance traveled. Local trucking establishments carry goods primarily within a single metropolitan area and its adjacent non-urban areas. Long-distance trucking establishments carry goods between distant areas.

Local trucking comprised 29,400 trucking establishments in 2008. The work of local trucking firms varies with the products transported. Produce truckers usually pick up loaded trucks early in the morning and spend the rest of the day delivering produce to many different locations.  Some local truck transportation firms may also take on sales and customer relations responsibilities for a client, in addition to delivering the firm's products.

Long-distance trucking comprises establishments engaged primarily in providing trucking between distant areas and sometimes between the United States and Canada or Mexico. Numbering 40,900 establishments, these firms handle every kind of commodity.

Specialized freight trucking provides over-the-road transportation of freight, which, because of size, weight, shape, or other inherent characteristics, requires specialized equipment, such as flatbeds, tankers, or refrigerated trailers. This industry sector also includes the moving industry—that is, the transportation of household, institutional, and commercial furniture for individuals or companies that are relocating. Like general freight trucking, specialized freight trucking is subdivided into local and long-distance components. The specialized freight trucking sector contained 47,600 establishments in 2008.

Many goods are carried using intermodal transportation to save time and money. Intermodal transportation encompasses any combination of transportation by truck, train, plane, or ship. Typically, trucks perform at least one leg of the trip, since they are the most flexible mode of transport. For example, a shipment of paper leaves from the mill and begins its journey when they are loaded onto rail cars. Next, trains hauls the cars across country to a depot, where the shipments are broken into smaller lots and loaded onto tractor-trailers, which drive them to printers or warehouses. Each of these steps is carefully orchestrated and timed so that the cars arrive just in time to be shipped on their next leg of their journey. Though some perishable and time-sensitive goods may be transported by air, they are usually picked up and delivered by trucks.

Warehousing and storage facilities comprised 15,200 establishments in 2008. These firms are engaged primarily in operating warehousing and storage facilities for general merchandise and refrigerated goods. They take responsibility for keeping general merchandise and refrigerated goods secure and in good condition. A growing number of warehousing and storage facilities also may provide some logistical services, such as labeling, inventory control management, repackaging, and transportation arrangement.

Trucking and warehousing firms often provide logistical services encompassing the entire transportation process. Logistical services manage all aspects of the movement of goods between producers and consumers. Among their value-added services are sorting bulk goods into customized lots, packaging and repackaging goods, controlling and managing inventory, order entering and fulfillment, labeling, performing light assembly, and marking prices. Some full-service companies even perform warranty repair work and serve as local parts distributors for manufacturers. Some of these services, such as maintaining and retrieving computerized inventory information on the location, age, and quantity of goods available, have helped to improve the efficiency of relationships between manufacturers and customers.

Many companies use just-in-time shipping, which means that goods arrive just before they are needed, saving recipients money by reducing their need to carry large inventories. These technologies and processes reflect two major trends in warehousing: supply chain integration, whereby firms involved in production, transportation, and storage all move in concert so as to act with the greatest possible efficiency; and ongoing attempts to reduce inventory levels and increase inventory accuracy.

Citation: Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Career Guide to Industries, 2010-11 Edition, Truck Transportation and Warehousing , on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs021.htm.

Neill Cartage and Warehouse is Chicago's premier full service logistics, warehousing, and distribution company.  Servicing the Midwest since 1946. 

Neill Cartage and Warehouse's freight container station is in the backyard of Chicago UP Global 2 rail yard.  With Neill's close proximity they are able to offer the most competitive drayage rates around.  After a container is transported from the UP Intermodal facility to Neill's Chicago warehouse, Neill can provide transload services, warehousing, and/or crossdocking services.

Transload services: This is the unloading of the product and the transfer of the product from ocean containers into domestic intermodal, less-than-truckload (LTL), or over-the-road (OTR) trailers. 

Warehousing services: Neill's public warehousing offers flexible space at a variable cost which can expand or contract based on our customers’ specific business needs.  Long-term and short-term storage alternatives are available. 

Crossdocking services: Crossdocking is a warehousing practice of transferring (or unloading) materials from an incoming tractor-trailer truck or rail car and then reloading these materials in another outbound mode of delivery such as semi-trailers or rail cars, with little or no warehousing in between. Cross docking is done to change the type of transportation being used, to sort materials intended for different destinations, or to combine material from different shipments. Cross-docking is used to decrease inventory storage by streamlining the flow between the supplier and the manufacturer.