More and more organizations recognize the need for establishing a permanent logistics function to improve their customer service.
Along with this recognition, managers realize the complexity of the issues and discover that logistics information management is at the centre of logisticians’ concerns. Information management is essential when undertaking customer service improvement through better product availability or personalized delivery. In all cases information will be at the centre of each decision. Consequently, business leaders today work together to set up IT tools for capturing and managing information.
There are usually three main avenues logisticians can take to manage distribution centres: firstly the internal development and adaptation of IT solutions with new desired features; secondly there is the integrated software (ERP) approach which will offer a very integrated but limited functional coverage; and finally the integration of specialized software packages. The optimization of integrated logistics processes generates considerable savings. These savings cannot however be achieved without appropriate management of information, resources and costs. The popularity of logistical information systems has grown in recent years in order to meet the requirements of today’s logistics managers. Analyzing and setting up the available systems can sometimes prove to be a difficult task.