TRA3153 Strategic Transportation Management - Curriculum Guide

Course Description

TRA3153 is a course in transportation management — how goods move, who moves them, what it costs, and how a firm plans and controls that movement as part of a supply chain.

⚠⚠ The statewide title says something else, and the title is the part that is wrong. SCNS records this number as "Applied Production/Operations Management." But the statewide description under that title is entirely about transportation:

"Presents the fundamental elements necessary to plan, implement, and control efficient and market-responsive integrated transportation systems. It examines the importance of transportation in the economy and the strategic and operational roles of transportation in supply chains. Emphasis is placed on domestic and global transportation operations, services pricing, carrier selection, equipment and shipment planning, transportation execution systems, intermodal operations, security, and expanded services in distribution."

And both Florida public carriers agree with the description, not the title. Florida State College at Jacksonville and the University of West Florida both call it Strategic Transportation Management.

⚠ Why this guide states the answer rather than hedging

This catalog normally treats a divergence between a statewide title and institutional titles as something to warn about rather than resolve. Here the evidence is one-sided enough to be settled:

• The state's own description — the fullest and most specific evidence available — describes transportation and never mentions production management.
• Both public carriers independently use the same transportation title.
• The prefix itself is `TRA` — transportation. Production and operations management is numbered elsewhere in Florida, under `MAN`.

So the statewide title is a stale label on an accurate record. The practical consequence for you: expect a transportation course, and if a degree audit, an advisor's list or a transfer evaluation shows the course as "production/operations management," be aware that the transcript label may not describe what you took.

⚠⚠ That cuts both ways and is worth thinking about before you rely on it. If your programme requires an operations management course and this number is listed as satisfying it, confirm with the department that they know what the course actually contains — because the course is genuinely not production/operations management, and a student who needs POM content (forecasting, inventory models, scheduling, quality management, process design) will not get it here. Get the answer in writing before you enrol, not at graduation audit.

Where it sits

Upper division, and normally a core or elective course in a logistics, supply chain management or transportation degree — an area in which Florida has genuine strength because of its ports, its position on trade routes to Latin America and the Caribbean, and the size of its distribution sector. It pairs directly with TRA4202 Logistics Systems Management, carried at Central Florida, FSCJ, UNF and UWF.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

Taken from the statewide description, which is specific enough to enumerate almost directly.

• Explain the role of transportation in the economy — its share of economic activity and of landed cost, and why transportation capability determines what can be produced where.
• Distinguish the strategic from the operational role of transportation in a supply chain, and explain how network design decisions constrain daily execution.
• Compare the five modes — truck, rail, water, air and pipeline — on cost, transit time, reliability, capability and accessibility, and select appropriately for a given shipment.
• Explain intermodal operations: containerisation, the drayage problem, rail intermodal, and the economics that make intermodal attractive over distance.
• Analyse transportation pricing — cost structures, rate determination, fuel surcharges, accessorial charges, contract versus spot rates — and explain why a quoted rate is rarely the landed cost.
• Conduct carrier selection and manage carrier relationships: evaluation criteria, requests for proposal, service-level agreements, scorecards and performance measurement.
• Plan equipment and shipments: equipment types and capacity, consolidation, load planning and cube/weight utilisation, and routing.
• Explain the role of intermediaries — freight forwarders, third-party logistics providers, brokers, customs brokers — and when using one beats doing it yourself.
• Explain international transportation: ocean and air freight, documentation, Incoterms, customs clearance, duties, and the additional risk and lead time global movement carries.
• Use transportation execution systems — TMS functionality, visibility and tracking, EDI and API integration, and what the data is used for.
• Explain security and regulatory compliance in freight transportation.
• Measure transportation performance: cost per unit shipped, on-time delivery, damage and claims, utilisation, and total landed cost.

Optional Outcomes

• Analyse last-mile delivery and the effect of e-commerce on freight.
• Evaluate transportation sustainability — emissions, modal shift, alternative fuels, and reporting.
• Apply quantitative methods: routing and scheduling models, network optimisation, simulation.
• Analyse supply chain risk and resilience, including disruption response.
• Examine transportation law and liability in depth.
• Examine public transportation policy and infrastructure investment.
• Complete a case analysis or live project with a regional employer.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Transportation in the economy and in the supply chain.
• The modes: characteristics, economics and competitive position.
• Motor carriage — truckload, less-than-truckload, parcel; the driver supply problem and hours-of-service rules.
• Rail freight and rail intermodal.
• Ocean shipping: container lines, alliances, port operations, chassis and drayage.
• Air cargo: economics, freighters versus belly capacity, and when the speed is worth the price.
• Pipelines and bulk movement.
• Intermodal and multimodal operations.
• Pricing, costing and rate negotiation.
• Carrier selection, procurement and performance management.
• Shipment planning, consolidation and routing.
• Intermediaries and outsourcing; the 3PL decision.
• International transportation, documentation and Incoterms.
• Technology: TMS, visibility, telematics, EDI/API.
• Regulation, security and liability.
• Metrics and total landed cost.

Optional Topics

• E-commerce and last-mile.
• Sustainability and emissions.
• Cold chain and temperature-controlled freight.
• Hazardous materials.
• Reverse logistics.
• Autonomous vehicles and automation in freight.
• Humanitarian and emergency logistics.

Florida-Specific Content

⚠⚠ Florida is one of the most logistics-intensive states in the country, and a Florida course in this subject has better local material than almost anywhere. This is also a genuine employment argument: the sector hires here.

Ports

Florida has a larger number of deepwater seaports than any other state, and they specialise differently — which makes them a natural teaching case in why network design is not a single optimisation:

• PortMiami — containers and a dominant position in trade with Latin America and the Caribbean; also one of the busiest cruise ports in the world.
• Port Everglades (Fort Lauderdale) — containers, petroleum products for South Florida, and cruise.
• JAXPORT (Jacksonville) — containers, and one of the largest vehicle-handling ports in the United States; strong Puerto Rico trade.
• Port Tampa Bay — Florida's largest port by tonnage, heavily bulk: petroleum, fertiliser and construction materials.
• Port Canaveral — cruise, and growing cargo.

⚠ Puerto Rico trade is a genuinely distinctive Florida topic, and it is where the Jones Act becomes concrete: cargo moving between US ports must travel on US-built, US-flagged, US-crewed vessels, which measurably affects cost and capacity on Florida–Puerto Rico routes. It is one of the clearest available examples of regulation shaping transportation economics.

Air cargo

Miami International Airport is the leading US airport for international freight, and it is the dominant gateway for perishables — particularly cut flowers from Colombia and Ecuador, and fresh produce and seafood from Latin America. ⚠ That makes the cold chain, customs clearance and time-definite air freight local subjects rather than textbook abstractions, and the flower trade around Valentine's Day and Mother's Day is a superb case in peak capacity planning. Orlando, Tampa and Jacksonville add further capacity.

Surface transportation

• I-95, I-75, I-4 and the Florida Turnpike carry the state's freight, with the I-4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando the centre of Florida's distribution development — a very large concentration of warehousing built because it can reach most of the state in a day.
• ⚠ Florida is a peninsula, and that is a structural fact about its freight. Freight enters and leaves through a narrow northern land corridor or by sea and air. There is no through traffic. That produces directional imbalance — more freight comes in than goes out — which raises inbound rates, creates empty backhauls, and is a concrete local instance of a central concept in transportation economics.
• Rail: CSX and Norfolk Southern serve the state; Florida East Coast Railway runs the Atlantic coast and connects the southeast ports. Brightline is a notable privately-operated passenger rail development, unusual in the United States and worth knowing about.
• FDOT publishes the Florida Freight and Multimodal Plans — free, current, and directly usable for coursework.

Florida-specific complications worth teaching

• ⚠⚠ Hurricane logistics. Florida runs one of the most practised emergency logistics operations in the country: pre-positioning of fuel, water and supplies, evacuation route management, fuel resupply under demand surge, and post-storm distribution. It is also a genuine career area, and the Florida Division of Emergency Management's logistics function is a real employer. Few states can teach disruption response from live local experience.
• Agricultural freight — citrus, sugar, winter vegetables and ornamental plants are seasonal, perishable and demanding of the cold chain.
• Cruise provisioning is a substantial and under-appreciated logistics operation: turning around a ship in a day means moving very large quantities of food and supplies in a fixed window.
• Theme park and hospitality supply — Central Florida's tourism economy generates continuous high-volume distribution requirements.
• Space freight. The Space Coast's launch cadence has created genuine demand for specialised transportation of oversized and hazardous components — a small but growing and distinctly Florida niche.

Resources & Tools

• Transportation: A Global Supply Chain Perspective (Coyle, Novack and Gibson) — the standard text and the most likely assignment.
• Contemporary Transportation (Wood and Johnson); Supply Chain Logistics Management (Bowersox, Closs and Cooper) for the wider frame.
• Professional bodies, all with cheap student membership and real job boards: CSCMP (Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals), ASCM/APICS, and NASSTRAC. ⚠ Certifications are valued in this industry — ASCM's CSCP (Certified Supply Chain Professional) and CLTD (Certified in Logistics, Transportation and Distribution) are the two most recognised, and CLTD maps closely onto this course's content. A student certification plus a degree is a materially stronger application than a degree alone.
• Data and documents, free: the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and its Freight Facts and Figures; the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for regulation; the Federal Maritime Commission; FDOT's freight plans; the individual Florida port authorities, which publish tonnage and trade statistics; and US Census trade data.
• Rate and market context: the DAT and Freightos indices, the Journal of Commerce, FreightWaves, Transport Topics, and Supply Chain Dive.
• Software: Excel is the working tool of this industry and fluency in it is directly employable — expect to build cost comparisons and optimisation exercises in it. Some sections use a TMS demonstration environment, SAP, or Oracle; Power BI or Tableau appear where the analytics content is emphasised.
• Incoterms 2020 — published by the International Chamber of Commerce. Know the common terms cold; misunderstanding who bears risk at which point is one of the most expensive routine errors in international trade.

Career Pathways

⚠ This is one of the better-employing subjects in this catalog, and Florida's logistics sector hires locally across the state.

• Transportation, storage and distribution manager (SOC 11-3071) — the direct destination.
• Logistician / logistics analyst (SOC 13-1081) — the common entry title for a graduate.
• Supply chain analyst (SOC 13-1081, 13-1111).
• Transportation planner / network analyst (SOC 19-3099, 13-1081).
• Carrier sales, freight brokerage and 3PL account management (SOC 41-4012) — ⚠ a very large entry-level employer, commission-influenced, high turnover, and a fast route to learning the market for those who stay.
• Import/export and customs compliance specialist (SOC 13-1041) — strong in South Florida specifically.
• Port and terminal operations (SOC 11-3071, 53-1047).
• Warehouse and distribution centre management (SOC 11-3071) — the I-4 corridor.
• Procurement and purchasing (SOC 13-1023).
• Emergency management logistics (SOC 11-9161) — the Florida speciality above.
• Military and defence logistics — Florida has a substantial military presence, and the skills transfer directly in both directions.

Special Information

Prerequisites narrative

The statewide record lists no prerequisite and no corequisite. In practice institutions expect upper-division standing and, in a business school, the usual lower-division business core — accounting, economics, statistics and a business computing course — and many restrict enrolment to declared business or logistics majors.

⚠ What the description assumes but does not name: quantitative comfort and spreadsheet skill. Rate analysis, cost-per-unit comparison, load planning and performance measurement are arithmetic-heavy, and the work is done in spreadsheets. Calculus is not needed; fluency with formulas, percentages and unit conversions is. Microeconomics beforehand helps with the pricing material. If your Excel is weak, fix it in week one — it is the single most transferable skill in the course.

Credits and contact hours

Both Florida public carriers offer this course at 3 semester credits. No Florida institution publishes a contact-hour figure; the 45 hours stated here is the Florida convention for a 3-credit lecture course and is derived rather than published.

Course-code variation across Florida

⚠ The `TRA` prefix is small and fragmented — 62 of the 79 distinct `TRA` identifiers carried by Florida public institutions are offered at exactly one school. The courses most worth knowing:

• TRA3153 — this course; FSCJ and UWF.
• TRA4202 Logistics Systems Management — Central Florida, FSCJ, UNF, UWF. The companion course, and the wider of the two: transportation is one function inside logistics, alongside warehousing, inventory and order fulfilment. Take both where you can.

⚠⚠ And note the prefix-divergence trap in this field, which is unusually bad. Supply chain and logistics subjects are taught in Florida under `TRA`, `MAN` (management), `MAR` (marketing), `ISM` (information systems) and `SCM`, depending on where a business school houses the programme. Requirement matching is by number, so read a target programme's requirement literally rather than by subject — a transfer student can arrive having taken the right subject under the wrong prefix.

Dual enrolment and high school credit

SCNS marks this number available for dual enrolment with elective high school credit. ⚠ All 89 active `TRA` numbers carry the identical marking, so it is a prefix-level default that says nothing about this course; as an upper-division business course it is not a realistic dual-enrolment option.

Transferability

SCNS records guaranteed transfer to an institution offering the same course. With two carriers the guarantee is narrow. ⚠ And the title problem above makes this the course in this batch where written confirmation matters most — a receiving evaluator reading "Applied Production/Operations Management" on a transcript may place it against an operations requirement it does not actually satisfy, or decline it for a transportation requirement it does. Keep the syllabus and get evaluations in writing.

Course format

Lecture and discussion with cases and spreadsheet exercises; frequently a term project analysing a real transportation problem, and at some institutions a site visit to a port, distribution centre or carrier terminal. ⚠ Take the site visit if it is offered — this is a subject that makes far more sense after an hour on a terminal floor than after a chapter about one.

Position in the curriculum

Upper division, normally in the second half of a logistics or supply chain degree, after the business core. Pairs with TRA4202, operations management, procurement and business analytics.

AI Integration

⚠⚠ Transportation and logistics is one of the most genuinely AI-transformed fields in this catalog — not as a future prospect but as current practice — and a student entering it should understand both the capability and the limits.

Where it is already in production use: demand and freight-rate forecasting; route optimisation and dynamic routing; load matching in brokerage; predictive estimated arrival times from telematics and weather data; warehouse automation and slotting; predictive maintenance on fleets; document processing, which is substantial when an international shipment carries a dozen forms; and anomaly detection in freight audit and payment.

Where the tools fail:

• ⚠⚠ Rates, transit times and capacity figures are confidently fabricated. These are live market quantities that move weekly, and a model will produce a plausible number with no basis. Rates come from a carrier, a broker, a TMS or a rate index — never from a chatbot, and a wrong rate in a bid is a real financial loss.
• ⚠⚠⚠ Regulatory and customs answers are exactly where being wrong is expensive. Hours-of-service rules, hazardous materials classification, tariff codes, Incoterms obligations, import documentation — errors here produce fines, seized cargo, and liability that does not fall on the software. Verify against the regulation, the tariff schedule, or a licensed customs broker. A model's confident HTS classification is a guess dressed as an answer.
• Optimisation output is only as good as its constraints, and real transportation constraints are numerous and local: a bridge height, a receiving window, a driver's remaining hours, a customer who will not accept a partial. An optimiser that does not know a constraint will cheerfully violate it, and the plan will look excellent right up to the point it fails.
• ⚠ Disruption is where forecasting models are weakest and where this industry lives. Models extrapolate from history; hurricanes, port closures, strikes and capacity shocks are precisely what history does not predict. In Florida this is not hypothetical — which is a good argument for the human judgement and contingency planning the course teaches.
• Fabricated citations and invented statistics in coursework. Verify every figure against BTS, FDOT, a port authority or a trade publication.

The professional point. This field is automating the routine execution layer quickly, and the work that remains valuable is exception handling, negotiation, relationship management and judgement about risk. ⚠ Learn the tools, and learn the fundamentals well enough to know when the tool is wrong — because the person who can only operate the system is doing the part that is being automated, and the person who understands the underlying economics is doing the part that is not.

Academic integrity. Follow your institution's policy and disclose AI use where required. In practice, expect employers to assume you can use these tools and to test whether you can sanity-check their output.