Transporation Logistics in Panama #HogsAbroad #IntlHogs

On Monday morning, we kicked-off this week by visiting the Panama Canal Railway Company, which is owned by Kansas City Southern and Mi-Jack Products. The Panama Canal Railway runs parallel to the Canal, yet offering different advantages from the Canal. Railway enables transportation companies to effectively transship cargoes without having to pay for the round trip through the Panama Canal. If containers come into the Panama Canal from Asian countries, unload the products, and go back thorough the Canal, it still costs the same amount for the empty containers. Using railway can eliminate this waste.

While visiting their terminal, I’ve learned that there are more cargoes coming from Asian countries starting around July till November. As getting ready for Christmas, companies import products from Asia.When I first came to the States, the scale of Christmas was one of the biggest culture shocks to me. Coming from Japan, where only 3% of population is Christian, seeing people getting excited for Christmas in Fall was surprising experience. I re-realized that transportation and logistics are influenced by many factors such as religion, culture, economy, politics, and so on.

We took a train to Colon on Tuesday, and visited Logistics Services Panama and Manzanillo International Terminal (MIT). At the logistics Services Panama, they offer variety of value-added services, including reticketing, relabeling, and repacking. One of the facts that blew my mind is that some countries require permanent relabeling for certain products, which means that they need to sew the label to the fabric instead of putting another label. This taught me that having customers across boundaries requires us to be cautious and flexible.

At MIT, we got to see one of the most recent technologies of crane. Automatic Stacking Cranes (ASCs) do not have a cabinet for a operator. For a traditional crane, a operator needed to work in a painful position, and the operator was allowed to work in the cabinet only for 4 hours a day. For ASCs, people control the movements from a building are called controllers, and they are able to work more than 4 hours. Rita, who works for MIT, said that company’s biggest investment is people, so they need to treat their employees well. It was very interesting to me that many of companies that we have visited were employees focused, and also have low rate of turnover. High profit does not necessarily make a company successful, but empathy to its employees as well as the community makes it successful.

Yuki

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Read more from Yuki at  https://yukiinpanama.wordpress.com/

Learn more about studying abroad as a Walton college student at: http://walton.uark.edu/global/

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