Logistics is commonly meant as transportation, sometimes warehousing.

When we know that a transportation and warehousing company packages medicine or bulk food, we are often appalled.

WHAT LOGISTICS REALLY MEANS!
Because we have forgotten what logistics really mean.

Maybe, it is good to dig into history to discover the real meaning of logistics and make a good use of it.

I beg your pardon if I use examples from the military.  Unfortunately, the non-military campaigns make  very poor examples of logistics.

Let us just think of an army in enemy territory or of a six hour bike race in hot California.  Man is no automata.  He needs ‘resources’, as automata to do work.  Man needs water, food, and shelter.  Many battles and wars were lost because supplies and resources were late to the battlefield because logistics were poor.

When we plan for action we seldom pay attention to logistics, we focus on goals.  We do not focus on resources.  We need to focus how to provide for resources and maintain them – that is Logistics.

In the latest Le Mans 24 hour car race, a German car won thanks to its system of recovering energy from  braking.  Is this not a form of “logistics”?

LOGISTICS AND ENVIRONMENT
If there would be a word, I would link logistics to environment.  I regret no word comes to my mind, it might be logenvics, which would mean the effective use of available resources and effective planning and provision of the resources needed.

It is an important question to ask why business companies do not demonstrate awareness of the logistics  in their business campaigns.  These companies seem to be moved more by emotional, rather than rational forces.  Logistics come from Logic, not only from Log.

Logistics is no joke, and certainly it is not only transportation and warehousing. And the resources it implies go as far as people motivation.

On campaign – whatever – one may have to suffer and endure – anything.

In rough terms, any campaign can be defined in the following terms:

• Why to go?
• Where to go?
• How to go?

The answer to the question “How to go?” is logistics.

Logistics projects are no easy thing.  They are mainly risk-based projects.  One has to anticipate well before what he expects to encounter, and be challenged by.

If I were the ISO 9000 Committee, I would rename my standard to “Logistics Management System” from “Quality Management System.”

Just think of any break-down: your car’s engine, the elevator, a late flight, a computer malfunction.

It is not quality that affects you, it is logistics instead.  You do not have what you need at that moment.

A logistics’ offspring is contingency planning or asking the really critical ‘what if’ questions.  Does it tell you anything?

DESIGN CHALLENGE
There is a further problem to effective Logistics, and that is design.

An example that may appear to be trivial, but that is meaningful, in many aspects: IKEA designers specify  plastic components thinking that the World climate is everywhere like Sweden’s. The car maker Volvo does the same, too. But when I buy IKEA’s curtains suspenders, my windows go to 40 plus Celsius in summer, and the swedish plastic is far too soft to keep a proper pressure, so the curtains fall. To my dismay.

It is not a question of “quality”, it is a question of being aware of what one delivers, and where.

We have to clear ourselves of product quality as “off of the shelf”: product quality is more and more “delivered product quality”, that is, what the buyer or consumer receives and perceives. This means that quality control or quality assurance are just steps on the road to quality to consumer, they are no more the ends.

I worked to a critical project some years ago.  It was about keeping an established temperature when warehousing and trucking milk products, like yoghurt.   The problem’s root causes were not production problems, they were inadequate logistics.