Please answer

A freight forwarding company arranges for 12 full ocean containers to be shipped over a four-month period from Mumbai, India to Calgary, Canada with an agreed- upon transit time of 25 to 30 days. Any container delivered earlier or later than this window would be a variation. The number of days the containers were in transit, from pickup at the shippers door to delivery to the customers DC, is plotted on the graph below. We can see that days in transit for the 12 shipments range from 21 to 40, with an average transit time of 26 days. The average falls within the agreed delivery range. An untrained logistician may think the transit times are thus acceptable and not try to improve them. However, looking at averages in supply chain can be dangerous

Questions:

1) Will this customer is satisfied with this servicewith this degree of variation?

2) If the customer was not happy with this service what could they do to mitigate the risk in longer transit times?

3) Look at the table below. The column that showscauses for variation lists potential issues that can cause the fluctuation in transit time.

Please provide 2 pros and 2 cons in the Possible Preventive Actions column assuming that the customer would address each of these causes for variation individually. (16 marks total)

Causes of Variation Possible Preventive Actions

Poor choice of carrier
Choice of destination port
Choice of trucker (At origin) for drayage to the port
At destination Truck rather than rail to the point of destination