Logistics at Large: Jumping the Barriers of the Logistics Function

Despite the enormous strides of the logistics profession in the last twenty years, it is still neither widely recognized nor easily understood by business professionals outside it. In part, it is because the profession itself has not yet succeeded in providing a widely accepted and easily understood definition of the field and its thrust. This paper presents a framework for thinking about logistics and its evolution, which might help to close this gap. It argues that logistics has been evolving in two major stages: from a focus on a collection of operational activities that define a function to a focus on coordination and flow management activities which give the profession an additional, much broader, identity. This framework is then used to suggest a new definition of logistics -one that reflects what advanced practitioners do and where we think the profession is heading. The new framework is then used to address certain logistics-related questions in new ways. These include a dichotomy of logistics companies; guidelines for contracting out logistics services; some thoughts on the required future skills; and some suggestions for teaching logistics.