Rapidão Cometa - A Quality Brazilian 3PL and Transportation Company

Brazil Site Visit

June 22, 2011

By

Richard Armstrong

Attendees:

Celso Queiroz, Director – Logistics

Rômulo Maranhão, General Manager – Rio de Janeiro

Cristiane Pinheiro, Sales Executive

Rapidão Cometa started as a trucking company 67 years ago.  It is still family owned by the Pereira family with a private equity investor.  It has 7,500 employees – about 4,000 in transportation and 3,500 in value-added logistics.  Transportation operations are split between two divisions – express package with 3,000 trucks and truckload/less-than-truckload operations.  Rapidão uses 1,000 of its own trucks and 2,000 exclusive owner-operators in its trucking operations.  Motorcycles are used in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro for express deliveries (especially in Sao Paulo, where car and truck traffic often moves at a snail's pace).  Rapidão makes 12 million deliveries a year covering all Brazilian states.

Its divisions are Rapidão Logistics, Air, Road, B2C and Pharma.  Twenty warehouses/terminals in the major cities of Brazil are the core for logistics operations.  There are also 22 freight terminal locations.  Recife, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Campinas are the largest.  The two major traffic lanes from north of the Amazon are Belem–Fortaleza–Recife–Salvador along the northeastern coast (1,650 miles) and Belem–Brasilia–Sao Paulo (1,860 miles).

Recife and Sao Paulo are the principal IT, central dispatch and company administration locations.  IT is used extensively for internal business communications and control, order management, customer interfacing (EDI) and security.

Rapidão is good at managing the ICMS (value-added taxes are 7% to 19% per state plus exceptions), the ISS (service taxes, special state (low cost) incentives) and freight taxes.  Since tax costs are often greater than transportation costs, weird and illogical routings are a common.

Security is a second strength for Rapidão.  All vehicles are GPS tracked.  Drivers have keyboards and notify central security before opening doors.  High crime areas have special handling practices.  Communication chips are placed in loads.  Armed escorts are used.  Closed circuit television monitoring is provided at all large terminals.  At the Rio terminal, there are 160 cameras with 24/7 monitoring on the upper floor of the guard tower which has a double door entry system.

Rapidão has a partnership with FedEx.  It runs 150 package trucks which have all the FedEx markings.  In addition, Rapidão advertises FedEx as its export partner to the world.

In the Rio warehouse/terminal, a mix of package, truck and cross dock activity happens in fenced off areas from a host of value-added warehousing activities.  Individual value-added warehousing and distribution customer operations are fenced off and each has a security system and limited access.

Individual services we saw included printers used for printing on beverage cans (required because of a special 25% VAT), an each picking

The high quality value-added operations at Rapidão are under the control of Celso Queiroz, an intellectual with a library of 8,000 books.  Celso is an interesting and creative guy who regularly designs high quality solutions.  Maranhão is a good operations manager very much in charge of the Rio facility.

For more info, contact Antonio Queiroz, logistics manager +55 11 2473-7300.

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