Freight Manager
When you’re the freight manager at a large supply chain operation, it can almost be like running your own logistics business. As well as overseeing teams that ensure fleets are staffed, well maintained and legally compliant, you might also be negotiating deals with third party carriers and logistics hubs, and you will be keeping a close eye on the department’s incoming revenues and outgoing costs, to better balance the books and keep the business profitable.
Freight manager jobs can also be quite specific when it comes to regions and modes of transportation. The typical rail freight manager and road freight manager will have distinct skill sets, responsibilities and abilities, but both will be very different to someone who deals port to port with shipping companies. What they all have in common is a deep understanding of how time pressure and transport capacities go to make freight management an exact science, with as little room for manoeuvre as a supertanker in the Suez Canal.
The skills required
The budgetary oversight of the department or company you are managing will be in your hands. Therefore, you’ll need to be a person who not only understands how finances work in the freight industry, but also how to do it efficiently and to root out areas that are underperforming and replace them with more cost effective solutions.
As freight manager, you’ll also be overseeing a potentially complex team of drivers, warehouse staff, brokers, legal experts and contract specialists who will need to work like clockwork to keep your freight moving to where it’s meant to be. You’ll need to be confident in your decisions and able to communicate them to the whole team to see your strategic vision to completion.
Freight Manager Jobs in Oxford
The county town of Oxford and famous throughout the world for its university, Oxford is actually a thriving, self-contained city with a diversity of industries not directly related to its county status or education sector. It has been a successful city for so long that its architecture spans the millennia, and since much of the most important buildings were churches, it got the name “city of dreaming spires”.
Without doubt the university and its related activities (bars, cafes, hotels, shops, theatres etc.) is the key single employer of the city, and the university heritage also plays into its thriving tourism industry. All this contributes to the thriving nature of the city, which is busy all the year round.
But a major industry just to the south east of the city centre is car manufacturing, at the Cowley BMW plant, home of the new Mini. The plant used to be the Morris Motors plant during the First World War, and this attracted a railway and other communications to serve it. During World War Two the plant made training planes for the RAF. After the war mergers and acquisitions changed the company to BMC, then British Leyland, Austin Rover, the Rover Group and finally BMW (but locals still call the factory Morris’s).
With a thriving, ever changing population and various high-tech and heavy industries, Oxford often throws up Freight Manager positions to help oil the wheels of commerce. It’s certainly an exciting place to live and work.
Popular locations
Freight managers needed nationwide
Every supply chain operation needs efficiency, so a good manager is like gold dust to any logistics operation. There’s a thriving market for anyone with the talent, and businesses offer attractive packages to the right candidates.
If you’re a freight manager with good experience, you are in demand right now, so please register your details via the link below. We can then match you up with some of the biggest and best supply chain companies in the world.
Companies that are looking for freight managers need to know they’re getting the cream of the crop when it comes to candidates. At Cast UK we only deal with managerial and executive-level freight managers, so we can whittle down an experienced shortlist for you to choose from. Call us on 0333 121 3345 to talk about specialist recruitment or get in touch here.
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