Location, people, leadership contribute to emerging transportation and supply-chain hub
The Greensboro-High Point area of North Carolina has long been a manufacturing powerhouse. Guilford County is first among its peers in the state and is high up on the list of manufacturing centers in the Southeast. North Carolina’s furniture industry has seen better days—although an uptick was recently reported—but it has been joined by other key industries such as aerospace and automotive. The labor market in the region is tight, indicating a prosperous economy.
Since manufacturing always interfaces with logistics, it’s not surprising that the region should have developed a robust logistics infrastructure. But that doesn’t provide a complete explanation as to why Greensboro-High Point has developed an excess of modern transportation and logistics capacity, especially considering the decrepitude of much of the infrastructure in the United States.
From an over-abundance of interstate highways to the proactive improvement of one-thousand acres at Piedmont Triad International Airport, the region is in the same class as logistics hubs like Indianapolis, Columbus, and Louisville. The question for the future is whether it can push into the same league.
Old Dominion Freight Lines, one of the nation’s largest less-than-truckload carriers, with 235 service centers across all 48 continental states, is headquartered in nearby Thomasville, NC. XPO Logistics, the largest third-party provider in the country and second-largest globally, headquarters its supply-chain management business and operates one of its three data centers in the region. Transplace, a transportation management company with $9 billion of freight under management and 20 million shipments a year, focuses its support for medium and smaller customers out of an office building in downtown Greensboro. Fedex and UPS have hubs in the area and Fastenal is opening its master East Coast distribution hub in the region.
“With the presence of manufacturing and other industries, and our terrific location, it makes sense that we are well-covered with infrastructure,” said Meredith Berger, director for existing industry services at the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce. “We have also had important state support to attract additional assets to our area.”
Demographics Play a Role
Demographics also explains part of the appeal, as companies develop transportation and distribution networks with proximity to suppliers, customers, and markets in mind. Transportation companies often look at one- and two-day driving and one- to two-hour flight radiuses when planning their networks.
“You’ve got I-85 providing access from Richmond to Mobile,” said Chip Overbey, senior vice president for strategic planning at Old Dominion Freight Line. “I-95 runs not far from Raleigh. We’re not far from I-77 and I-81. We also have access to the ports of Norfolk, Wilmington, Charleston, and Savannah.” The east-west I-40 also runs through the region.
With trucks covering around 630 miles a day, Old Dominion can hit 75% of the U.S. population within two days of Greensboro-High Point. That includes everything from central New Jersey to central Florida as well as Chicago, Memphis, and St. Louis. “If you take Texas and California out of the mix,” said Overbey, “that’s just about everybody.”
It’s also worth noting that Greensboro-High Point is a major population center itself, home to 1.7 million people, over 800,000 of whom participate in the labor force. Nineteen regional colleges and universities educate over 100,000 regional students. Well over half the population has some post-secondary education.
People power - “They have a great work ethic,” said Overbey - is another reason why logistics companies are attracted to the region. “The Greensboro-High Point area is a great place to work,” said Bill Fraine, executive vice president for sales and operations at XPO Logistics. “It’s not hard to get people to move here.”
Educational institutions have seen the handwriting on the wall and have ramped up transportation, logistics, and supply-chain management training and educational programs in recent years. “There is a lot of logistics and supply chain education going on in the Triad, from the high school and community college levels to the four-year college level,” said Ken Waldron, senior business process management software and training manager at Transplace. “We have groups of students that visit Transplace that we encourage them to work here. We are developing that talent pool.”
Guilford Technical Community College in Colfax offers a logistics and supply-chain program of seven courses that teaches students everything from purchasing and inventory management to warehouse operations. Around 60 students are currently enrolled in the program.
“We have mostly older students between 30 and 55 years old,” said Associate Professor Samuel Chinnis. “Most are already in the industry and realize they need a degree to progress.” Some already have degrees and are looking to earn a certificate at GTCC to prove proficiency in a specific skill.
In particular demand is the certificate in SAP—the dominant enterprise resource management (ERP) system for larger companies. GTCC is part of the SAP University Alliance through which it receives software from the company. SAP is taught in four of the seven logistics and supply-chain courses.
The courses emphasize understanding business processes from end to end and how technology influences those processes. “We also teach soft skills like teamwork,” said Chinnis. “This is a career that absolutely requires you to work with other people. I say to students that I hope that is something that energizes them and doesn’t tax them.”
Leadership
Visionary political and governmental leadership have perhaps played the most crucial role in building out Greensboro-High Point’s infrastructure. In High Point, local government annexed land and prepared sites for development before the businesses and residences that currently occupy that area were even imagined. “They caught a lot of grief for that at the time,” noted Loren Hill, president of the High Point Economic Development Corporation. “They were accused of building a bridge to nowhere.”
The scenario is being played out at the airport, where state funding contributed to building a new taxiway from one of the runways to as yet undeveloped acreage. “The state Department of Transportation has done a lot of great things in this area,” said Kevin Baker, executive director of the PTI Airport Authority. “We have some talented people who are looking not five years but 50 years down the road.”
