Logistics Is about Competitiveness and More

Stripped to its basics, logistics is about capturing competitive advantage and creating customer value, not just optimizing costs. This fundamental value proposition cuts across micro and macro units of analysis ranging from effectively monitoring and responding to changing behavior of individual consumers, to improving supply chain management (SCM) processes of firms, to efficiently connecting enterprises across the global economy. The spreading wings of logistics research in the past two decades reflected largely the proliferation of extended enterprises, technological innovations, and transportation and telecommunications advances globally. A significant focus of logistics research in the latter quarter of the 20th century was on enhancing firm productivity and profitability, mainly through operational/tactical improvements in planning integration. But even here, scholars increasingly recognized that multi-enterprise networks were supplanting the firm as the effective competing unit [1]. The explosive growth of e-commerce in the 21st century, especially e-tailing, and the rise of smart mobile devices placed capturing and serving individual consumers as operational and research priorities. Concurrently, at the macro-level, accelerating globalization led to substantially more research interest on supply-chain disruptions and measuring logistics performance of geopolitical entities such as cities and countries as key to their trade facilitation and overall competitiveness [2]. As the analytical units of logistics research broadened, so too have the substantive topics addressed, with scholarship moving beyond traditional business issues. Contemporary environmental and social consciousness, developments in the pharmaceutical and biomedical sectors, and transformative technological innovations such as 3-D printing are generating new waves of research and substantive writings on such issues as green logistics, disaster and humanitarian logistics, bio-logistics, and alternatives to product shipping. Cool-chain, temperature-assured, and air logistics are receiving greater attention as a burgeoning worldwide middle-class desires fresh food and health-care products from wherever they are sourced. Air cargo (now accounting for 35% of the value of international trade) is simultaneously supporting globally integrated supply chains of microelectronics, fresh-cut flowers, medications, and other high-value perishables [3]. Concerns about fair trade, worker rights, depletion of fossil fuels and critical minerals, carbon emissions, and the sustainability of the entire logistics chain have come into play, shaping consumer, business, and government attitudes toward product origin, along with distance and mode of shipments. Value-influenced logistics and supply chain management are gaining significant traction as fields of research inquiry. This traction is corroborated by Wieland, Handfield and Durach who surveyed 141 leading SCM researchers requesting them to identify the topics that they believe will have the greatest impact on the field in the coming five years [4]. “Sustainability”, which included ecological, economic, ethical, and social aspects, was mentioned the most frequently. When these thought leaders were asked what they believed should become important future research topics, sustainability/green issues once again ranked at the top. Two transformative developments, however, will likely have the greatest implications for future logistics research and operations. The first is cloud computing as it is influencing big data and predictive analytics, the internet of things, and machine learning. This is enabling much more detailed