John Deere & Company manufactures and distributes agricultural equipment as well as a wide range of construction and forestry equipment. The company partners with FedEx 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 costs and services depending on the type of business unit. With different prices and services across facilities, management attempts to identify opportunities to standardize costs and services across business units. The objective of this case study is to update Deere & Company's logistics by recommending solutions to reduce logistics costs by 69 million over 3 years. Analysis and RecommendationsCurrently, Deere & Company's 11 facilities operate under a different level of on-site transportation service. On-site transportation services and associated costs presented in Table 2 (OSTMS, OSRF) vary for each facility, indicating a lack of standardization. Inflated costs can result from local managers having individual operating principles that do not reflect the best interests of the company as a whole. Confusion among employees can result from similar goals being treated differently in each business unit. Time and money are wasted because workers will need time to organize and communicate information from one facility to another. Unproductive costs are incurred and must be resolved through consolidation of on-site transportation service. The on-site transportation service is currently favorable to Deere plant managers and could be improved by standardizing middle of paper... ...to manage inbound and outbound logistics, staffed primarily by outbound logistics personnel. These professionals handle Deere's second core competency, logistics, separate from tractor and lawn mower manufacturing. Creating this team eliminates the risk of poor performance from Fedex (managers were unhappy with Fedex's centralized transportation management service) and having to continually measure the performance of a third party. As a result, performance is self-managed. We anticipate that as the computer system is used to optimize and plan transportation routes between inbound and outbound trucks, the cost savings will increase more quickly. We believe that continuous internal improvement, streamlining of logistics operations and synergies between all logistics activities will achieve the target of $69 million in the third year after implementation..