Logistics and Supply-Chain Management facing major challenges

Although the event that revealed to the world the essential role of logistics in the success of a large-scale operation was the landing of the Allied Forces in Normandy on June 6, 1944, this approach is in fact much older, initially in the military sphere before, much later, spreading to the corporate sphere.

The main thrust of this article is to highlight the fact that logistics management, and later Supply-Chain Management, emerged from a long process of maturation that began in the United States in the 1950s, no doubt following the demobilization of the large number of engineers involved in the design and implementation of American military logistics, before spreading to Western Europe ten or fifteen years later.

This may explain why the first preoccupations of Logistics were primarily focused on techniques for modeling and optimizing transport, handling and warehousing operations, before developing inventory management models. This article shows how, after building up this technical base, the logistics of certain pioneering companies evolved in the 1980s towards a more systemic and managerial approach to managing the physical flows of goods that converge on the company from its suppliers, pass through its industrial facilities and diverge to serve its customers.

This managerial vision then moved towards flow-based management, a resolutely process-based approach to the main corporate functions involved in generating the physical flow of goods. With the support and responsibility of General Management, logistics management gradually sought to integrate the various corporate functions in charge of these flows (Purchasing, Production, Distribution) across the board, in order to synchronize them at the lowest possible cost, while offering an optimum level of service.

Logically enough, under the pressure of highly competitive markets, logistics management has finally moved towards a more global, holistic approach to Supply-Chain Management. This brings together partner companies with often redundant logistics resources in a meta-organization (the extended enterprise?), the only one capable of deploying complementary, or even pooled, resources in the service of a shared common objective.

Supply-Chain Management could also - and this is the final hypothesis of the article - prove to be a very promising collective response, if not the only realistic one, to the multiple challenges posed to companies by the accelerated mutation of markets, by the opportunities arising from the explosion of technologies, particularly those relating to Information and Communication, and by the demands of sustainable development.