School Buses for the Urals? Why Not

By Timothy J. Gibbons, The Florida Times-Union, Jacksonville

Oct. 27–If students in the Ural Mountains of Russia ever get to travel to classes in school buses, Jacksonville’s logistics community can claim a little bit of the credit.

Victor Shapovalov, who helps run a transportation company in Yekaterinburg, got hooked on the idea of school buses during the past two weeks, which he spent in Jacksonville with eight other transportation and logistics company leaders.

The group spent the time touring operations like the Jacksonville Port Authority, CSX Corp. and Landstar, but Shapovalov was able to also squeeze in a visit to local school bus companies, taking a look at how they operate.

“In our country, there is no such thing as school buses,” Shapovalov said through a translator. “They use city transportation, but it’s not always safe.” The generation of such ideas — big or small — was the point of the two-week visit, a project organized by the Center for Citizen Initiatives, a San Francisco-based organization that has over the past decades put together trips for thousands for Russian executives.

The center, which used to receive grants from the State Department, is actually about to phase out the business program, citing a lack of funding.

The trip to Jacksonville was done with the aid of Rotary International, with members of the Oceanside Rotary Club hosting the Russian visitors.

During their time here, the business leaders toured about 10 companies, looking at how things in Jacksonville compare with operations at the companies throughout Russia where they work.

The group was diverse, representing ports and trucking companies, freight forwarders and equipment conveyors. The Jacksonville companies were selected to match up with those interests, said Robert Wood, dean of the division of continuing education, at the University of North Florida, which set up the curriculum for the trip.

That diversity was useful for people like Topchiy Mikhail, director of the Vladivostok branch of the Chukotka Trading Co., who classified everything he saw into three groups: things his company is doing, things it’s not and things that it can move toward doing.

“I have some interesting ideas,” he said. “And it was interesting to see some companies doing exactly what we do.” The group ended up in Jacksonville because of Wood, who heard about CCI at a Rotary gathering. Because he’s now establishing a certificate program in international logistics at UNF — and he used to run a trucking company — Wood’s interest was piqued when he saw that logistics was one of the industries the group was looking to focus on.

“It was fun putting it together,” he said. “A program like this is really valuable in developing relationships, relationships that can carry on for years.” And those contacts, the participants said, will continue to bear fruit, on both a personal and a business level.

“We gained a lot of relationships with real people,” said Vadim Rojavski, director of Intermost Logistics in Novosibirsk, a company that helps importers connect with companies in China — particularly useful locally as Jacksonville establishes trade lanes with Asia.

“Getting acquainted with Jacksonville was the No. 1 benefit.”

—–

To see more of The Florida Times-Union — including its homes, jobs, cars and other classified listings — or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.jacksonville.com.

Copyright (c) 2007, The Florida Times-Union, Jacksonville

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.