Editorial director Lou Smyrlis has accepted an invitation from the Heavy Duty Distributor Council to serve as a luncheon speaker at HDDC’s annual conference in June. He will speak on the trends driving today’s fleet management practices and what fleet managers expect from their suppliers in response.

Smyrlis spoke to transportation purchasing students at Seneca College in February about trends in transportation and logistics.

He also spoke at the Canadian Institute’s Pharma Supply Chain 2007 conference, detailing rate, volume, capacity and surcharge trends in pharmaceutical shipping and referring to the results from our annual Transportation Buying Trends Survey.

Sister publication Canadian Transportation & Logistics, in partnership with the Canadian Industrial Transportation Association and CITT, has launched the sixth annual Shipper’s Choice Awards Survey.

The research project, the largest of our 8-10 annual research projects, surveys more than 2,000 Canadian shippers on the key performance indicators used to select carriers in every mode.

It also asks them to rank the performance of their top carriers against their expectations.

The results are included in the August issue of Canadian Transportation & Logistics, and carriers scoring above the benchmark of excellence set by the survey are able to include the survey logo in all their promotional material.

Truck News executive editor James Menzies recently renewed his A/Z licence.

He will be test driving the Kenworth T660 in late February – stay tuned for his review.

Menzies and technical editor John G. Smith were at the Technology and Maintenance Council meetings in Florida in February.

Some TMC-related news can be found in this issue, but for a complete list of new product announcements, visit trucknews.com and select ‘TMC New Product Wrap-up’ in the Knowledge Centres section of the site.