D.W. Morgan is dedicating a portion of our success to fight hunger through our Delivering Hope for the Hungry fund-raising campaign. Our goal is to provide 30,000 meals to starving children around the world in March, by making a donation for each shipment delivered through our supply chain! Our partner in this amazing initiative is Feed My Starving Children, a non-profit organization focused on providing critical meals to the most poverty-stricken areas in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Our corporate donation will be supplemented by fund-raising efforts via social media. Delivering Hope for the Hungry has its own website which can be accessed at www.MorganDeliversHope.com. It costs just 17 cents to produce one meal, so $1 goes a long way!

We chose to partner with Feed My Starving Children because 94 percent of our donation is directly used for their meal program.

In 2008, Feed My Starving Children brought more than 73 million meals to children, providing children in Haiti with more than 25 million meals. The organization makes a difference and we’re thrilled to be a part of this outstanding effort.

Please visit www.MorganDeliversHope.com to help us raise much needed dollars for these children. Every little bit counts!

Feed My Starving Children meals are distributed in more than 60 countries through missionary partnerships at orphanages, schools, clinics, refugee camps and malnourishment centers.

Here’s what your donation will do!

• $30 feeds 6 children for a month
• $62 feeds a child for a year
• $170 brings 1,000 meals
• $310 feeds a family of 5 for a year
• $1,530 feeds a village of 100 for 3 months
• $6,120 feeds a village of 100 for a year

Give now! Go to www.MorganDeliversHope.com.

At a meeting the other day, a prospective client asked me how Morgan gets information into its system on time, completely and correctly. I explained to him that to achieve this, we devised what we call the “perfect shipment,” an innovative quality assurance program.

Our Perfect Shipment initiative began about three years ago, after I had attended a conference during which the W.W. Grainger concept of the “perfect order” was discussed.  A “perfect order” is achieved when a set of criteria are met.

Out of that we at D.W. Morgan developed our own criteria for the “perfect shipment”:
1.    In our system within 30 minutes
2.    Picked up on time
3.    Client informed of delivery status
4.    No damage claims
5.    Timely proof of delivery
6.    Invoiced within 24 hours of completion
7.    Minimum profitability level achieved

We’re not perfect yet, but we are closing in on that holy grail. For the most recent period, we scored 87 percent, and we now average 85 to 90 percent. A significant improvement over our first year, during which we–ahem–scored 6 percent. And to think: Our customers liked us back then!

The stumbling block in achieving the perfect shipment, we found, came from the lack of a corporate-wide vision within the company’s divisions. Individual employees were focused on their tasks, but they were not invested in the big picture.

We told our drivers, “Don’t be late and don’t break it!” But that’s all they saw as being important. When it came to filling out shipping documents and updating the system, they were chronically late, which led to late billings and customer annoyance.

The accounting department was focused on billing, but the clerks didn’t see the bottom-line value of each shipment. Thus, we lost money on some shipments.

To address these challenges, we invested in a company-wide training program, and we offered quarterly incentives to the employees based on how well the company performed in terms of perfect shipments. We rallied the company around that single perfect-shipment number and instilled the notion of teamwork. Accounting began talking to the drivers, and the drivers began asking accounting, “How are we doing”? The number of perfect shipments shot up dramatically.

Even so, while we are pleased with 87 percent perfect, we are not satisfied. We continue to shoot for that perfect score.

In today’s just-in-time global economy, one of the toughest supply-chain and transportation logistics challenges that manufacturers face is the “last mile” — arranging critical inland transportation for their goods.

The easy part is sending components overseas to a factory via airfreight or ocean. But handling requirements, tracking visibility and delivery coordination often break down when the shipment is handed off to a local delivery company for that last leg of the journey. That’s the weak link in the supply chain.

To help companies deal with this ongoing problem, D.W. Morgan created an industry-first Global Drayage service. We have established a ‘Supply on Demand‘ footprint everywhere there is a key high-tech manufacturing center, whether the goods are moving to America or Asia. The network of dedicated and Morgan-managed assets stretches across North America and to manufacturing and distribution locations in Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America.

After nearly a decade of providing services in Mexico, we now have a full office in Guadalajara–and we’re building a dedicated fleet of trucks transporting goods for high-tech manufacturers throughout Mexico and to/from North America.

Having our feet on the ground at the world’s major manufacturing centers allows us to help companies solve that critical “last mile” problem so their goods arrive just in time.

Real-time communications is de rigueur for efficient supply-chain management and transportation logistics, especially in the “supply on demand” world we now live in.

Tracking visibility and delivery coordination are all-important.

That’s why Morgan adopted the Apple iPhone as its mobile communications platform. The device is relatively inexpensive and it is supported in more than 85 countries. What’s more, it builds GPS and many other essential features in to the handset.

Thanks to the iPhone, our customers get shipment tracking reports and recipient signatures in real-time.

It’s also saving us a ton of money. For the past 10 years we looked at our options, but found nothing that offered the flexibility we needed at a reasonable price. With the iPhone, we can document a healthy ROI. (I think a starting point of $100,000 in savings is healthy, no?)

And it’s good for the environment. D.W. Morgan is now paperless. We have eliminated paper way bills and remove some 150,000 pieces of paper—a stack as tall as a five-story building—from the consumption cycle each year.

For the icing on the cake, we got a great profile on Apple’s website. Check it out at: http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/profiles/dw-morgan/.

Fortune Small Business also featured us in a recent story about creative uses of GPS technology (July/August issue, p. 48), and online at: http://money.cnn.com/2009/07/08/smallbusiness/inexpensive_gps_phones.fsb/.