John Deere & Company manufactures and distributes agricultural equipment, as well as a wide range of construction and forestry equipment. The company collaborates with FedEx in order to maintain the logistics flow involved in the company's transactions. FedEx is responsible for providing outsourced transportation services to 11 Deere facilities in the United States and Canada. The 11 Deere facilities have different service agreements with FedEx in terms of cost and service depending on the type of business unit. With pricing and services varying across facilities, management is looking to identify opportunities to standardize costs and services across business units. The objective of this case study is to update Deere and Company's logistics by recommending solutions to reduce logistics costs by 69 million in 3 years. Analysis and Recommendations Currently, all 11 Deere & Company facilities operate at a varying level of on-site transportation service. On-site transportation services and associated costs listed in Attachment 2 (OSTMS, OSRF) vary for each facility, indicating a lack of standardization. Inflated costs may result from local managers adopting individual operating principles that do not reflect the interests of the company as a whole. Confusion may occur among employees because similar goals are addressed differently in each business unit. Time and money are wasted, as workers will need time to organize and communicate information from one facility to another. Unproductive costs are being incurred which must be resolved through the consolidation of the on-site transport service. The on-site transportation service is currently favorable to Deere plant managers and could be improved by standardizing the...... middle of paper... ...to take care of inbound and outbound logistics, mainly staffed by outbound logistics. These professionals deal with Deere's second core competency, logistics, separate from the production of tractors and lawnmowers. Creating this team helps eliminate the risk of Fedex's poor performance (managers were dissatisfied with Fedex's centralized transportation management service) and the need to continuously measure the performance of a third party. Consequently, the performance is self-managed. We expect that as the IT system is used to optimize and plan transportation routes between incoming and outgoing trucks, cost savings will increase more rapidly. We believe that continuous internal improvement, leaner logistics operations and synergies across all logistics activities will lead to the achievement of the $69 million goal by the third year of implementation.