1. NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2014 | www.PARCELindustry.com 11
offices, housing and other buildings for
multiple industries.
For instance, his own office has five
containers on the first floor and three
on the second floor, makes up 2,400
square feet and has doors, windows,
bathrooms, stair cases and showers. To
say these units are hurricane proof is
putting it mildly.
Stephen says, “We create safe plac-es.”
Falcon has re-manufactured 20,000
of these so far and he says
laughingly, “we are on are way
to the first million.”
Falcon Containers ranks
eighth in the fastest growing
large companies in Central
Texas with 275% growth from
2011-2013.
Cost of a unit ranges from
$10,000 to $150,000 de-pending
on the value additions.
Stephen is a serial entre-preneur,
having done soft-ware
and a myriad of other
technical programs. I love his slogan:
“Think Inside the Box.”
If the supply chain industry could figure
out how to repurpose everything this effi-ciently,
the benefits would be enormous.
ROB SHIRLEY is CEO of ExpresShip, a strategic
consultancy in the global supply chain. Contact
him at rob@xpship.com or visit www.xpship.com
BY ROB SHIRLEY
SUPPLY CHAIN PIVOT
Containers Are Like Macro Parcels
he PARCEL Forum in
Dallas was excellent,
and it is impossible to
exaggerate the impact
of meeting old and new
contacts.
I have been thinking
about the “origins” of par-cels
and packages before they
arrive in warehouses. If they
originate outside of the USA, there
is a strong possibility that
they travel in a container
first on the ocean, then by
rail and finally by truck. They
are then broken into separate
pieces and placed on ware-house
shelves.
I was particularly impressed
by Dr. John MacDonald, Profes-sor
at Michigan State Universi-ty
in the department of Supply
Chain Management, and his
presentation at the PARCEL
Forum. He spoke at length on
warehousing and global practices and
touched on the newest ships that Maersk
has built and has in operation.
Maersk Triple E class ships are 1,312
feet long and 194 feet wide and Maersk
has placed a $3.8 billion dollar order
with Daewoo Shipbuilding for 20 vessels.
She travels at 22 mph, consumes 37%
less fuel and conserves 50% of carbon
dioxide. This was good enough to win the
Sustainable Ship of the Year award.
The ship is so large that it can only
dock in Long Beach in the USA and can-not
fit through the Panama Canal. The
Triple E carries 18,000 TEU (twenty foot
equivalent units-containers). The pure
steel weight of the Triple E is 55,000
tons and is operated with 22 crew mem-bers.
The Panama Canal currently can
take 3,000 TEU and is aggressively ex-panding
to hit 4,000 — a long way from
handling a Triple E.
Containers were invented in 1956 by
Malcolm McLean and totally revolution-ized
transport and international trade.
They have a very long life span, but at
the end of their usefulness as shipping
containers, the rebirth that happens next
is really fascinating.
Stephen Shang is CEO of Falcon Con-tainers
here in Austin. He originally start-ed
renting containers to customers and
found more customers interested in own-ing
them as assets.
His first mega customer was the De-partment
of Defense, who commissioned
Falcon to build cities for soldiers to live
in. This project lasted for four or five
years until Stephen ascertained that hav-ing
only one huge client is often times
not optimum for building a business.
Falcon now manufactures containers
that are fully depreciated as shipping
containers. The 20-foot containers weigh
5,000 pounds with walls and ceilings
of 16-gauge steel and floors of 1 1/8”
plywood. These are custom modified into
If the supply chain industry
could figure out how to
repurpose everything this
efficiently, the benefits
would be enormous.