With agility and adequate partnership strategies towards effective logistics networks

In the mid-1970s, there was a change in many areas of the economy - caused by the laws of supply and demand from sellers' markets to buyers' markets. This macroeconomic phenomenon - i.e., economics - had decisive consequences for logistics partnerships among companies, and thus for microeconomics. Individual companies today seldom possess all the necessary technological competence to develop and manufacture products of a certain complexity rapidly and economically efficient with advanced technology. Single organizational units no longer handle development and manufacturing. Instead, these tasks are distributed among various companies or among several organizational units within a company. In a logistics network, the companies involved form customer-supplier links. With the exception of the consumer, each customer is a co-producer within the logistics network, and thus is also a supplier. The world of practice reveals that through the course of time, and in dependency upon the concrete demands, different partnership strategies evolve in logistics networks. These may be classified accordingly. We will examine the consequences, which appear gradually, upon the length and intensity of cooperation among companies in a logistics network and derive some plausible future scenarios. For the duration and intensity of cooperation within a logistics network, there are various strategies of partnership. According to supply and demand, as well as the type of product, all of these forms are valid today. The present contribution focuses upon four strategies in particular, namely, the "traditional" customer-supplier relationship, supply management, supply chain management, and virtual organizations. The latter three forms of cooperation were developed in response to short lead times. They are all longer-term in nature. Here, virtual organizations attempt - on the basis of a long-term network - to achieve short-term company cooperation for specific customer orders. Fundamental principles of effective logistics networks concern the agility of a company. Agile competitors, are competitors who understand how to remain competitive by means of proactive amassing of knowledge and competency. Automation with broad implementation of information technology supports agility. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.