Sustainability

An engine of Asian development, India holds outstanding potential for investment in its logistics sector, which is experiencing above average rates of growth. However, high transport costs and long delivery times greatly detract from India’s prospects in the logistics sector. Despite these problems, India still offers investors excellent long-range prospects since it is working hard to eliminate the recognized problems.

sperous technology - until 2010 79 % of the users plan to extend the usage of RFID in logistics. However, the majority of users lacks in economic success with their current RFID applications. The reasons lie in the difficulties of building a solid business case and the complexity of the implementation itself. This article presents strategies of successful companies - focusing on partner integration - to cope with this complexity.

In this paper we show an integrative solution to freight traffic reduction. Beside telematic systems we also regard software for planning and control of swap bodies in the area of courier express and parcel provider. The objective is to design a decision support tool for transport planning to support users to solve their daily problems of tour planning. The software prototype introduced in this contribution was provided in the context of the BMWi promoted project Inwest and will be evaluated in field test in third quarter of 2009.

Strategic Sustainability Management represents the basic business mission in addressing the socio-political principles of sustainable development and belongs to the key challenges for companies of any size or sector. An analysis of scientific literature and empirical studies allows categorization into value-oriented, stakeholder-oriented and identity-oriented motives. This article gives a systematic review of the current managerial motivations for strategic sustainability management.

In this paper we introduced in transport planning based on evolutionary algorithms. The objective is to design a decision support tool for transport planning manager to support the planning process. An important criterion is to minimize the transportation (km) by using this tool. The prototype introduced in this paper was tested with real business data to check the suitability for transportation planning. Furthermore, different settings for the evolutionary algorithm are experimentally studied their utility is verified with statistical tests.

The demographic change will be one of the big challenges for operational logistics in the upcoming years. With the aging of logistics workers, physical constraints increase especially when employment is characterized by high physical stress (e.g. like in production and logistics). That causes higher demands on the design of logistics workplaces. But how can companies react to this, taking into account that value added orientation leads to new demands to workers? Is there a chance that the increasing percentage of elder employees can properly fulfil the demands in the future? Whereas the ergonomic design of workplaces is the precondition, an intelligent labour organisation with diversified stress can preserve the worker’s ability to work.

Autonomous vehicles are employed in intralogistics in order to transport work pieces between different workplaces. Previous guidance systems are based on wire-guided tracks or optical following of surface markings. In the first case, the possibility to change the production layout is rather limited. In the second case, abrasion can significantly decrease recognition rates. In contrast, humans easily succeed in navigation tasks, even in dynamic environments. A promising approach is therefore to apply a cognitively motivated spatial representation for autonomous vehicles. This article presents BA23, a set of 23 qualitative relations for qualitative spatial reasoning, and discusses its application in intralogistics.

With time, products lose their attractiveness on the market, technology becomes outdated or customer demands are no longer met. To keep up success, companies need to replace old products. This means a huge amount of product changes for a manufacturer that differentiates through customer-focused product design and continuous product innovations. Ramp-up and phase-out-management are critical factors of success. As the product life cycles shorten due to the dynamism of the technology and markets, payback periods for the development costs reduce, too. In order to maintain profitability or to increase it, it is necessary to minimise the cost and time of product changes. This article shows how logistics contribute handling a lot of complex ramp-ups and phase-outs with optimal cost and in a short time.

Complexity does not emerge from the drawing-board. Complexity evolves through the permanent attempt of an organization to emerge and distinguish itself from the competition. Complexity penetrates a company on many different levels. The battle to control and, if possible, reduce expensive complexity can not be won by just putting up concepts. What is the best concept good for if the corporate management can not realize it? In practice we observe many executives lacking in pragmatic, down to earth approaches. Most managers are not aware of that. Our experience taught us the following: Initiatives for complexity-reduction are successful when continuous, real-time and action-oriented management information-systems are in use during and after the transformation process. The relevant complexity indicators have to be transferred to management and staff. Both must work proactively to reach the goal of complexity reduction. Last but not least all assigned actions for complexity-reduction have ...

In future, classic logistical targets will be supplemented by the target “safeguarding of resources”. In view of the close chaining of logistic processes, holistic and sustainable approaches are needed to achieve an optimum oriented economic and ecological general condition of logistic systems. This article introduces the need of new strategies in logistics and the relevance of new concepts to increasing the logistical performance.