[分享]5PL, A Solution to Address Logistics Concerns & Problems
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#1: [分享]5PL, A Solution to Address Logistics Concerns & Problems (4405 reads) 作者: 二悟村 文章时间: 2007-3-05 周一, 22:18
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作者:二悟村海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com

自从4PL产生以来,信息技术的发展使许多规模制造企业开始使用ERP,而趋势是BI的引入。这对二十一世纪的物流提服务也出了新的挑战:如何进一步融入客户的供应链管理已提高全面运营效率?5PL的使命应该能够从这个基础开始的。

Part One. XPL, the Buzz Word and Its Extensions By Default…

Forewords

“The rules particularly specified will be outlasted; the fames acquired in defined specializations will fade away…”(“Dao ke dao, fei chang dao; ming ke ming, fei chang ming.”) This is the statement the Chinese classical philosopher Lao Zi, the founder of Daoism, started with his “Dao De Jing”. We tend to define things as we come to know, based on our concurrent findings appropriate to the particular conditions corresponding to specific times. Our accumulative learning process is ongoing, and our knowledge is constantly alternated and updated. Simply put: things change and we must change accordingly: change or be changed. The world evolves and we develop ourselves to adapt, reactively or proactively.

From pre-industrial times to post industrial times, the viable technical means develop prompt the market needs and customer expectation to develop in same pace; as direct consequences to such developments, the logistics relation problems and the solutions change too: when the maritime power derived from the ocean going ship building technologies and navigation science enabled the global trade hundreds of years ago, before the rail transportations and air lift capacities came to offer their commercial services. The latter were soon followed by highway carriages for more economic and more flexible surface transportations within certain ranges. The prime solutions from last century were initially from service parties operating their service assets and referred to as carriers, when “shipping” and “transportation” were the means of services helping facilitating the trades from across oceans to moving to the next town/village. But then, as the trade expands, pure knowledge based shipping services came to further improve logistics solutions, complimenting the asset based logistics service of different transportation modes.

At the first decade of 21st century, most of us have heard about a buzz word of “4th Party Logistics”, or 4PL, an outsourced logistics operation management solution. 4PL as the latest knowledge specifically developed to certain needs, has become more popular among certain enterprise economy scales. The enterprise economy scale is a key word here because the enterprises with hundreds of million dollar annual freight account payable can afford more professional services proportionally, whereas their corporate structure complexities that produce mismanagement ciaos and expensive but otherwise overlooked human errors, thus in needs for more metrics based operations. It makes sense for enterprise of such economy scales, most likely have adapted KPI based operation procedure requirements by now, to deploy 4PL for their SCM related operational functionalities under specific metrics in monitoring and integrating the logistics service rendering parties of earlier service modes. The buzz word of Logistics began to emerge.

What exactly is Logistics? Depends who you ask, the answers can be very different. You can consult dictionaries or the academic doctrines from the world of academia. But many enterprises and individuals use the same term in different context: just to take a look at the job descriptions for Logistics Managers at various enterprises, it is defined widely different from one enterprise to another. While ERP/MRP and BI experiences or knowledge are required, in addition to analytical skills, as key credentials to perform as a Logistics Manager at certain enterprises, some simply replace the former title of Shipping Manager or Transportation Manager with Logistics Manager, others may add warehousing management responsibilities to it, while there are also those to cover distribution networks…Logistics Management is perceived with different notions and practiced entirely different. This is because the logistics related problems, as part of business operational and managerial sequences at entities, are recognized by individual enterprises differently and subsequently dealt with accordingly. It is therefore a part of a corporate culture and a solid foundation where certain style of logistics operation management is defined and set to run on a routine track.

All commercial enterprises started their business operations with the solutions to their storage and shipping/transportation needs, or logistics problems, only some of them migrated in time to the state of contemporary school of business management systems where they deemed necessary and felt comfortable for the time being. Conceptually, most corporate cultures, that updated themselves in their business management theories and methodologies within the past two decades or so, would agree that logistics is all about planning and the capacity and capability to expedite the well thought trough plans effectively and efficiently. From this premise, the author believes that contemporary logistics management is of combination of following: 1) A knowledge body comprise of certain school(s) of management theories appropriate to certain times of economic and technical conditions, the corresponding routine procedure based operating and managerial experiences, proven business models, practiced, adjusted and established methodologies and the associated techniques and skills applying them, the tools and resources pooled for deployment in the managerial and operational processes. 2) The capacity and capability at the enterprise level to identify the ongoing logistics problems impacting its supply chain and to set particular strategic goals along with specific tactic task objectives, to initiate and implement the measurement metrics of improvements in a set of programs of transformation process. 3) As a key link of the entire supply chain carrying increasingly more weight in the globalization of market economies today, it is a new vertical integrated command system, with intelligence and planning derived from the frame works of all earlier isolated functionalities in the same supportive operational roles. This is why the word “logistics” is not interchangeable with the word “transportation” or “shipping” with or without the addition of “warehousing” to it. Logistics management is placed over these functionalities as to better integrate them into the overall supply chain operation management system at enterprise level with added values in integrated and well coordinated planning capacities, as well as subjective measurements over the operational performances. Logistics managers are ONLY for the enterprises already developed to the phase where an identified need is established for such additional functionalities (other than the shipping/transportation and warehousing) to be added to their organizations.

In fact, different knowledge bodies are deployed to carry out different tasks set forth by different visions: 1PL, 2PL, 3PL and 4PL, each represents a knowledge body of logistics solutions appropriate to particular logistics operation and management challenges, adapted individually or collectively, developed in respond to the concurrent problem evolution in time.

To facilitate any good planning, one need to collect and analyze relevant data, resource sharing tools would certainly come handy for that purpose. Today, in recognition of enterprise resource sharing, more and more business enterprises either have implemented or en-route implementing ERP and WMS, some even implemented BI and integrated into their systems to forecast the demands, so as to schedule the production outputs and therefore the supply chain capacity mobilizations. There are so many viable products from specialized 3rd party software vendors and services already available, but understandably these products were designed on generic basis. This is because to have these products work with most enterprises, they would be designed on more common characteristics across all enterprises for their operational managerial problems. Thus upon implementation, they need to be “customized” to suit specific corporate culture and business operation routines, the process of integration and implementations demands change managements within an enterprise.

Yet, even if the implementations are done ideally and the gaps in mentalities and logics between the operational team and the IT team are well studied and well addressed, there is still a need to interconnect between the software infrastructure implemented intra enterprise and inter enterprise. At the times of information explosion, the quality of cross infrastructure integration becomes very important to assure the effective leverage from the investments into the infrastructure, sometimes even just to ensure full utilization of the infrastructure is not counter-productive in actual results.

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作者:二悟村海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com



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