The Role of Logistics’ Information and Communication Technologies in Promoting Competitive Advantages of the Firm

With the rapid growth of technologies, our economic society and life are changing significantly in the 21th century. The way to capture their competitive advantage has become the most important issue for enterprises in the rapidly changing and uncertain business environments. Many researches have pointed out that the adoption of technology is the most important tool for enterprises to keep their competitive advantage. The survival of an enterprise in the age of knowledge-based economy depends on how to improve their technological capability. In this sense, firms should develop adequate methodologies, in order to adopt, in a successful way, new technologies in the logistics field, and also to integrate logistics into the corporate strategy for becoming even more competitive. Growing number of firms are under pressure from their partners to change their traditional management style, both operationally and organizationally, replacing them with integrated systems that help increase the speed and fluidity of physical and information flows. In order to reach this kind of integration they are investing on new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). In this paper we consider that the ICT are the devices or infrastructures to make more efficient the communications of business information among organizations (Dawe, 1994).