1. Evolution of the logistics approach

Any industrial or commercial activity must necessarily deal with logistics processes: recording customer orders, distributing finished products, managing inventories, planning production, sourcing supplies from suppliers. What company doesn't have to devote significant resources to these processes? And this has been the case for as long as there have been companies, and even for as long as there have been craft, industrial or commercial activities, even if we don't yet talk about logistics. The origin of the word is military: army logistics is the deployment of all material resources to support operations.

For a long time, companies considered logistics to be a secondary function,...