Exam Preparation B2 C1 Lesson 14: Logistics

B2/C1 Exam Preparation Course Lesson 14: Logistics

Smart Logistics with Visual Goods Tracking

Delivering the goods: The story of smart logistics, starring The visual goods tracking solution from Axis and partners.
Smart logistics is a third party logistics company. Everyday it deals with more than 25,000 packages. Six months ago, this was how things worked at Smart logistics. The company scanned goods and packages at checkpoints throughout the warehouse. These scans where recorded in its warehouse management system so it knew when a package arrived, went through quality check, moved to a shelf, passed an operator station, or left the building.
The company even installed some security cameras to monitor critical steps in the process. Most of the time everything ran smoothly. However, sometimes a customer filed a claim about damaged, lost, or mispacked goods.
Investigating claims took up a lot of time. Smart logistics needed to find out whether it was responsible for the deviations. And, if the company was, it needed to know what had happened, where it happened, and why. Employees could spend several hours going through video to find the answers. Sometimes they found what they were looking for. More often, they didn’t. With that came the risk of compensation, penalties, and a loss of customer confidence.
To protect its reputation the company brought in a new system from Axis and its partners. The visual goods tracking solution. Smart logistics installed cameras to cover the whole warehouse and integrated a video management system with its existing scanning and warehouse management systems.
Today, high definition cameras capture the goods as they enter the warehouse. Then, they record the packages journey through the warehouse, monitor goods at operator stations, and, finally, capture the packages before they move on to the next stage of their journeys. And, if a customer files a claim, the claims manager just enters the package’s  ID to find all the video for that package.
When Smart logistics is responsible for a deviation it takes immediate action to prevent the same mistake from happening again. And when it’s not responsible it can quickly prove it to customers. Smart logistics knows, and can prove exactly what’s happened to each package in its care.
What’s more, it’s reduced the number of claims it faces and the resources spent on investigating those claims. The company has enhanced its reputation with a full transparency service, based on the visual goods tracking solution from Axis and its partners.
Find out more about the Axis visual goods tracking solution at axis.com/package.

Vehicle Scheduling Schemes for Commercial and Emergency Logistics Integration

Xiaohui Li ,
Qingmei Tan
The increasing complexity and magnitude of global emergency relief operations create a critical need for effective and efficient disaster-relief logistics. Disaster prevention, protection, and reconstruction are the major areas of focus to reduce human suffering and damage from disasters. Quick response to the urgent relief needs right after disasters through efficient logistics dispatch is vital to the alleviation of disaster impact in the affected areas, which remains challenging in the field of logistics and related study areas.
The significance of issues on relief salvaging to areas suffering from disasters, e.g., drought and earthquakes, and the resulting logistics problems had been addressed previously. As for relief resource’s delivery, transportation researchers have tackled different topics such as shortest path selection and vehicles schedule.
This range of studies has developed very consistent knowledge on how emergencies can be better managed throughout mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.
Once an unexpected disaster strikes, quick salvaging efforts are immediately made by governmental agents, non-profit organizations or individual volunteers. Moreover, at the same time, upon the government’s instruction, some commercial logistics companies immediately participate in the relief operation by proving efficient and effective transportation service. As argued by Lyles, there is always a fierce need for coordinating the logistics resources of public and private sectors to avoid arbitrary resource allocation during disasters. In practice, compared with non-professional organizations, the private-owned logistics companies have turned out to be the backbone in disaster-relief activities. That is, besides the ordinary inter-regional commodity exchange, commercial logistics companies also play an important role in emergency relief distribution. Thus, there emerges a practical concern for a commercial logistics company as to how to coordinate the commercial and emergency logistics operation with the purpose of performing relief dispatch obligation with as little as a possible negative impact on commercial transport safety.
Some specific features of the emergency transportation problems were discussed in previous literatures. However, the commercial-and-emergency logistics integration problem received far less attention. One of the reasons lies in the differences between commercial logistics and emergency logistics. Commercial logistics has been clearly defined in the previous literature as “Logistics is the process of planning, implementing, and controlling the efficient, effective flow and storage of goods, services and related information from the point of origin to the point of consumption for the purpose of conforming to customers’ requirements at the lowest total cost”. But the definition of emergency logistics has not yet been well clarified. Another reason is illustrated by Wei Yi and Arun Kumar who hold that emergency logistics support and vehicle dispatch have features different from the established commercial dispatch settings.
Despite these differences, the commercial and emergency logistics systems share some common grounds in many aspects, which have formed a concrete foundation for their integration. First of all, both consider material items, number of vehicles, modes of transportation, number of depots, demand of materials, transportation networks, vehicle capacity, travel time on the route, and various operational modes. Their objectives are to seek for a combination of those variables that minimize total traveling time, minimize size of the vehicle fleet, maximize service capacity, and minimize fixed and variable costs.
The minor difference between these two systems lies in that in addition to efficiency objective, emergency logistics also pay emphasis on fairness. Secondly, similar to commercial distribution systems, emergency distribution systems also consist of three separate parts: demand, supply, and transportation. The collection points of commodities in non-devastated areas play the role of supply, while the demand points are the devastated areas where relief resources are provided to victims who play the role of customers. The only difference is that the distribution depots are temporary storage points instead of a permanent distribution warehouse.
In China, two traditional scheduling schemes are prevailing for emergency logistics schedule. For the first scheme, denoted by scheme 1, the available vehicles are utilized in emergency logistics business with no commercial business involved. The logistics company, therefore, gains profits of governmental subsidies minus relevant costs, and at the same time suffers losses occurring from idle vehicles. For the second scheme, denoted by scheme 2, the logistics company can accept commercial business on condition that the disaster-relief requirements are satisfied and there is not any commercial business to be performed on hand. Thus, the daily earnings for the company are emergency logistics subsidies plus commercial profits.

(SOURCE: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0082866)

WRITING SKILLS

You can either:
* Complete 2 writing assignments. You have 40 minutes if you wish to complete one now. The 2nd assignment you can complete at home.
* You can also watch our Grammar VIDEO tutorials during the next 40 minutes if you prefer to complete the Writing at home.

For IELTS (Academic format), please select the ESSAY topic (250 words: in 40 minutes. Counts for 2/3 of the Writing score) and GRAPH DESCRIPTION (150 words: in 20 minutes. Counts for 1/3 of the Writing score). You will have 1h to complete both tasks on the day of the exam.

* ESSAY: Write an essay discussing the rise and importance of logistics due to internet sales etc.
* GRAPH DESCRIPTION:
United States Postal Service:
This visual aid shows us the delivery process of the United States Postal Service, with Mail flowing through a national infrastructure. Summarise the  information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

For IELTS (General format), please select the ESSAY topic (250 words) and LETTER (150 words). You will have 1h to complete both tasks on the day of the exam.

* ESSAY: Write an essay discussing the rise and importance of logistics due to internet sales etc.
* LETTER: Write a letter to a logistical company complaining about a damaged parcel.

For FCE, please select 2 of the following: ESSAY, LETTER/EMAIL, REPORT, or REVIEW. You will have 1h20 to complete the tasks on the day of the exam.

* ESSAY: Write an essay discussing the rise and importance of logistics due to internet sales etc.
* LETTER: Write a letter to a logistical company complaining about a damaged parcel.
* REVIEW: You have just read an article on the rise of oil spills. Write a review on the process, addressing rising demand and economic variables.
* REPORT: Write a report on the rise of logistics and its impact on the environment.

For CAE, please select 2 of the following: ESSAY, LETTER/EMAIL, PROPOSAL, REPORT, or REVIEW. You will have 1h30 to complete the tasks on the day of the exam.
* ESSAY: Write an essay discussing the rise and importance of logistics due to internet sales etc.
* LETTER:  Write a letter to a logistical company complaining about a damaged parcel.
* REVIEW: You have just read an article on the rise of oil spills. Write a review on the process, addressing rising demand and economic variables.
* PROPOSAL: Write a proposal on a way to improve logistics including delivery times, tracking, communication etc.
* REPORT: Write a report on the rise of logistics and its impact on the environment.

For TOEFL, please select the ESSAY topic and write a second essay response based on either the READING or LISTENING passage of the lesson. You will have 50 minutes to complete both essays on the day of the exam.

* ESSAY: Write an essay discussing the rise and importance of logistics due to internet sales etc.
* ESSAY: Essay response based on either the reading or listening passage of today’s lesson (Logistics): Based on the reading, the are many international laws in place when it comes to logistics. During disaster relief, do you think these laws should be negated? What implications may surface should such laws be lifted?