Korean Canal Project - part 1

The inland waterway system in Korea, the biggest vision of South Korea President elected, Lee Myung Bak brings a high conflict of interest among the public. Most of the people concern toward the environment problem since the river is a potential resources to provide water.


Many organization tried to against this brilliant idea, that was implemented in several developed country, such as USA, some European, and China as well. Many logisticians think that this is a better way to save environment from the gas and oil problem.


Let see from the beneficial perspective of using the waterway transportation system. We assume that Seoul-Busan will take 500 km in distance. Some researcher in Netherland (Goederenvervoer in Netherland, Ministerie van V&W) had researched that costs per tonkm is shown as in the next table. Let assume that all big vehicle will carry the container. There will be 0.04 Euro different. A 160 TEU ship may brings a lot of containers that equals to 120 trucks.
We can simply said that there will be a cost reducing about 120 x 0.04 Euro x 500 = 2.400 Euro for each shipping.

Busan port handled 1.3 million containers in 2007. (source: Dynamic Busan monthly newsletter). Let assume that 1 truck could carry 1 container. Therefore, we may multiply 1.3 million container with 0.04 Euro and 500km distance, that is equal to 26.000.000 Euro. (1 Euro = 1500 won: 2008). So, the Korean can save about 39 billion won in transportation cost if they use the inland waterway system.


This simple enumeration is just considering the naive transportation cost related with distance. We have to consider other aspect, such as reducing the gas emission regarding the usage of variety of trucks, safety factor of using waterway system, etc.


Today, I just bring some data related to the beneficial of developing the canal project in Korea. However, the government should do research in more detail regarding other environment problems may exist of doing this big project.

resource-based outsourcing

2008 has come. The industrial world trends have move toward outsourcing. The biggest issue as cited from Supply Chain Daily.com is that oursourcing will be the trend of 2008.

The outsourcing process usually takes place as a process outsourcing. Manufacturers outsource their product to speed up the lead time and save some cost toward excessing the production capacity. However, this kind of outsourcing is the common model recently.

There is no limitation among the world. The Information Technology (IT) give a huge advantage to bridge the gap between each location, due to distances and time problem. In the next period, not only process which can be outsourced, but also resources that can be shared among industry, country and other organization.

Resource-based outsourcing is adapted from the process-based outsourcing. The head-hunter organization may think that employee turn-over is getting growth for the economic reason. But, the trends toward migrating from one organization to another organization is changing to the word "outsourcing" itself. People, or other resources, don't have to move to other organization. They can have such kind of authentication and authorization to do some task to help the growth of other organization. The reward will be based on the result of the resources contribution.

Such of mechanism in BPM (Business Process Management) called resource management has developed some controls toward this idea. The access control in distributed environment will be the basic idea to implement the resource-based outsourcing. Nowadays, I am doing research about RBAC (Role Based Access Control) which is an approach toward the security issue in the BPM system.

Therefore, prepare yourself to be a globalized person. You don't need to move to other country to get a better salary. Ability, credibility and competence are some of the key issues for getting the job of the resource-based outsourcing from your place where you are now.

Business Process Management

Let me introduce the concept of Business Process Management. It stands from three words, business, process and management. The word business relates with economic, efficiency or other activity that gain some profits. Process wants to explain that an activity contains a single step of task toward a goal, completion of a process. And, as you already know, management means designing, managing, controlling and evaluating the whole system related with the business process.

I hope I can write more about BPM after some time.....