EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The case The Threat of Global Gridlock by George Stalk highlights that the world is about

to face a major crisis in transportation because of not meeting the demand of the global economy. Statistical trends for key parameters of transportation by truck, train, ship, and air are presented to reveal the trends up to 2007. All those trends concludes that congestion and delays will damage business profits, forcing companies to rethink their long, complex supply chains, and wise organizations will use unorthodox methods to cut oftenhidden transportation costs and outmanoeuvre rivals. It is argued that the current global economic and financial crisis ('credit crunch') and recession is masking the problem of global transportation capacity and demand. The author predicts that, if the re-establishment of pre-recession trends in consumer demand patterns coincides with the current reluctance to tackle the basic problems involved, then lack of infrastructure capacity, in combination with rising oil prices, will constrain global trade and drive up costs. It also includes a discussion concerning how the companies will be affected by this problem, and suggests that choosing the right means is important to gain competitive advantage over competitors, moreover to save cost of logistics. Strategic issues involved The impact of transportation bottlenecks, increasing congestion and delays in logistics will hit all around the globe which concerns for the issues that i. How a company can manage a better supply chain management and efficient logistics networks to offset the higher costs of production and labour resulting from a long and inefficient logistics and supply chain? ii. How important is it to reassess the current companys business footprint to achieve long term success? iii. How the company can address the explicit and implicit cost arising from the overstock and stock outs of inventory in supply chain?

Strategies to deal with those issues Post economic crisis after the recovery of the economy begins, the lack of infrastructure capacity, combined with rising oil prices, will constrain global growth. To overcome these problems the first step is to understand the cost and time trade-offs built into logistics system and measuring the slightly increase cost 1. Hot hatching and direct-to-store strategy also play great roles to make the goods available at timely and at low price. The other strategies to deal with those issues are as follows:i. The practice of reserving the manufacturing capacity from supplier to get preferred treatment as demand for products fluctuates can be taken. The initiation to increase the capacity of the transportation facility has to be taken not only from the government sector but also the private sector should also be involved. ii. To deal with problems the companies should also shift their sourcing footprint to the lower cost countries like china and at the same time they should also eliminate the long and complex distribution channel. For this the flow of information among the parties in a supply chain network should be improved. iii. We often believe that the air transportation is expensive than road and shipping but that might not be always true if we consider the implicit cost. So detail study of the implicit cost is necessary while choosing the modes of transportation as air transportation is not always expensive than road and shipping.