Logistics

Logistics service providers do not only want to grow and to increase their turnover, but they also want to handle more profitable performances provided for their customers. However, since September 2001 this has not been an easy venture considering the low economic performance and the weakness relating to market conditions. On the other hand, economic situation-caused problems are often an opportunity for companies from industry and trade to rethink their own core businesses. Often even logistics services will be outsourced. This article describes the possibilities for logistics service providers on the market, especially how they can create more value for their customers and their own business.

The emergence of internet technologies has led to a fundamental transformation of value chains. For logistics service providers in particular new revenue sources and new roles in supply chains evolve. E-logistics helps to reduce the transaction costs in supply chains and hence increases the willingness for outsourcing. The ability to integrate seamlessly into customer processes, which can be referred to as collaboration capability, is a central competitive factor in the outsourcing industry. Also in this area e-logistics plays the role of an innovation driver. This article discusses the potentials and barriers of e-logistics initiatives and collaboration for logistics service providers and their customers and structures the design parameters of collaboration through a methodology.

Increasingly enterprises are hoping for a decline of marginal unit costs by turning away from in-house logistics. Free competition among contract logistics services is believed to open up new optimisation potentials. At the same time, performance related accounting models permit to transform the formerly fixed logistics costs into variable costs. However, because of the complexity and the customer-specific character of supply chain processes there is no standard method for the rating and selection of suitable service partners. The main problem is to provide information for a detailed description of the expected performance spectrum and thus to enable performance related contract positions. The method of „quantity and product related logistics costs” permits an exact quantification for multi stage products before placing a service order. It is a contribution to cope with the challenges described above.

Planning and organising of value added processes can be optimized by supply chain management. Therefore, creating a virtual supply chain organization (VISCO) is suggested. The main tasks are building up a specific organization for the collaboration, applying modern information and communication technologies, and implementing innovative logistics systems in the VISCO. Furthermore, it is necessary to harmonize the different plans of the companies involved. With the help of a special value added management in the VISCO it is possible to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the value added process significantly.

Most supply chain controlling approaches found in literature still focus on a single company instead of an entire net and thus do not live up to their promises. This article points out several problems that require the transition to the bird’s eye view and briefly introduces concepts that are truly inter-organizational in their nature. We close with a critical evaluation of what has been achieved in this field.

Visteon is one of the largest automotive suppliers world-wide and is focused on innovation and permanent improvement. For Visteon that means the consistent implementation of Lean Manufacturing concepts. Thereby lean in-house logistics represent a core aspect. For that reason the Visteon plant at Düren is developing innovative concepts for the dynamic controlling of the overall material flow together with the chair of production systematics of the university of Aachen. With the implementation of the simple yet flexible variant Kanban system Visteon plant Düren is obtaining a leading position with regard to innovative in-house logistics.

Airports as trans-shipment centres, within the transport networks of the world-wide air transport, represent complex knots of huge logistic networks. Cargo handling at airports is significantly determined by the location, the design and dimensioning of the cargo terminal, as well as by the internal and external handling relations. The examination and implementation of the modelling and simulation of relevant processes within a realistic part of an air cargo network is the focal point of this article. Its aim is to evaluate and design air cargo processes between two air cargo hubs and their respective origin and destination airports as a whole. It is shown that individual approaches to reduce costs of the parties involved are not as efficient as considering the whole transport network including all external handling relations.

Increasing competition in product costs leads worldwide to the need of process improvement - especially in small and medium-sized enterprises. Projects of production and logistics, with the aim of optimising process organisation and manufacturing control are assumed to have the knowledge of decisive system parameters and adequate possibilities in interference. Against this background the efficient use of the resource information is very important in future. Precisely because the use of RFID in production control has even more rationalisation potentials, when the process monitoring of production process must be fast, safe and efficient real time close controlled.

The complexity of today’s products and the resulting complexity of business and manufacturing processes are already very high. Product complexity will increase because of the growing number of engine and car body variants. The possibilities to choose and to combine extra options will increase as well. In order to identify potentials for optimisation and to evaluate new concepts of cooperation and collaboration in multi-tier intra- and inter-company supply chains, these processes have to be modeled and described according to requirements of the automotive industry. The Supply Chain Operations Reference-Model (SCOR-Model) is an instrument to develop a simple and flexible methodology to model structures of supply chains and to scale realistic logistics processes.

A significant part of traffic in urban areas nowadays is transport traffic within the „last mile“, i.e. vehicles on delivery or pickup tours transporting goods from or to customers. This article describes new IT services, which on the one hand help optimizing this logistics traffic and on the other hand make the deliveries more customer-friendly.