Volvo - Truck Manufacturing Industry

Perhaps it’s with the bankruptcy of Chrysler LLC that automotive and truck industries have been revamping their policies to invest in and produce more efficient and cost-effective means of transportation. More specifically, by improving the infrastructure and reducing the environmental impact of trucks, Volvo Trucks North America is trying to open new ways of increasing highway freight transport productivity. A means of progressing towards this goal would be investing in the use of more productive trucks, claims Scott Kress, Volvo’s senior vice president of marketing and sales. However challenges of safely delivering more freight and being more efficient to support current and future demands remains. While demands of freight transportation has increased with the population and economic growth over the decades, infrastructure investment for highway and bridge system for freight deliver has remained unchanged, resulting in significant freight bottlenecks that cost the US economy tens of billions of dollars per year, says Kress.

Idealistically, if efficient truck production was achieved, productive trucks would consume less fuel, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and depend less on foreign fuels. With safe performance as Volvo’s core value and foundation of the company, Kress claims that Volvo’s Trucks’ initiative to promote the generation of leaner and safer trucks on the highway is paramount to their success as a leading company of the truck industry. However, it’s not just the production of more efficient trucks a strategy of improving truck transportation that would transform the industry—there is also factors of road infrastructure would aide in the global impact.

So what does this show us? Keeping up to date with the infrastructure could save our economy billions of dollars—an investment surely a worthy of pursuit with this revolution of energy efficiency. Public policy must change to reduce such bottlenecks that are not only caused by the vehicles on the road, but the road congestion the result from poor infrastructure. Nonetheless, with Volvo Trucks North America initiating change, perhaps other companies of this industry can see the benefits in similar investments and start converting their companies to providing more productive trucks on the road.

Bottlenecks and extra expense can be avoided and efficiency can be attained with better management. Does your company face a similar situation? Feel free to discuss with me to further aid your company in finding a solution to become more efficient.

*This post is from our previous blog site FactoryScheduling.com, from May 11, 2009.