Electronic Logistics – The Money Saving Solutions
Future trends in e-logistics
The latest trends in e-logistics have been the subject of several new studies presented at the leading international business fairs. A special emphasis was given to Radio Frequency Identification tagging (RFID) and the development of out-sourcing and customer centricity. Furthermore, the concept of LOG-IT club, aiming at better communication within the field if logistics in terms of new developments and requirements of both IT and logistics, is gaining popularity.
RFID - Radio frequency identification tagging
The system of Radio frequency identification tagging (RFID) has already proved its effectiveness in the field of transportation and logistics. Its further development has been hastened by the increasing demands of major buyers and retailers globally. However, the simultaneously existing technologies such as bar codes are still necessary, due to the lack of standardization for RFID and its currently high prices.
And still, RFID is considered a key technology for supply chain management in all the important commercial sectors globally and actively required by big retailers. Labels or so called “tags”, reading devices and servers are combined in a hardware that stores information about the product, its date and location of manufacture, components origin and their work lifespan.
RFID tags can also be passive verification devices that can be used to trace goods and ensure safety in manufacturing, such as for preventative maintenance tasks in the industrial sector or for monitoring plants and machinery.
Customer centricity
The thing that created the trend for customer-centric services and solutions is the customers’ demand for higher quality. It became obvious that fitting the customers’ needs into the standard transportation and warehousing model can be inefficient. That is why they collaborate with the customers to create solutions that improve the result of services based on transit times, product considerations and costs. For instance, several companies offer professional installation and assembly of PCs, office systems and devices, furniture, sporting goods, etc. in addition to high-tech information system that tracks and manages the items from their pick up to their delivery.
Nevertheless, the customer-related optimization of the services creates obstacles and it becomes difficult to manage the wide range of activities efficiently. As a result, emerges a need for flexible business processes of logistics services that can manage to face the varying requirements of the clients.
It turns out that in order to make it possible for the logistics companies to create customized solutions and to handle the resulting complexities successfully, investment in IT, transportation and warehousing is required.
Outsourcing
There is no need to say that the expansion of the Internet has made it easier and cheaper to communicate between business partners. The environment has become very competitive which made companies specialize it their primary capabilities and outsource their secondary services. Basically, there is a trend towards outsourcing of logistics third party logistics service providers (3PLs). Total outsourcing is gaining popularity as well. There is a number of 3Pls (or group of 3PLs) that handle a dot-com company’s entire backroom operations. The 3PLs receives the goods from vendors based on Internet orders and performs warehousing, order picking, assembly, packaging, and shipping, as well as the huge job of handling returns.
All of the above serves to prove that logistics services represent an important sector of the U.S. and world economy. The steady growth of the logistics sector has already led to the increase of logistics’ influence and significance in almost all business industries.
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