The diversity of names given to facilities serving logistics often creates conceptual confusion and makes it difficult to distinguish the functions of these objects. Names for logistics facilities are created both for formal reasons, stemming from the desire to place the described object within the broadly understood panorama of logistics infrastructure, and for practical reasons, usually dictated by marketing considerations, aimed at distinguishing a specific facility and emphasizing its role and importance.
In practice, it does not matter much what name is given to a specific infrastructure object. However, formal considerations argue for the necessity of unambiguously naming a specific class of objects, as this is important in the sphere of planning, designing, and implementing investments, establishing business contacts, and communication, which takes place under conditions of diverse, often extensive, and frequently complex economic ties between enterprises. It is also important in journalism, as well as in the sphere of scientific research and education, one of the goals of which should be to prepare logistics personnel who use uniform terminology for the same reasons. One such concept, created during the period of the emergence of a new class of logistics infrastructure objects, is the concept of a logistics center, which, in the face of the intensive development of these and similar objects in recent years, is becoming increasingly ambiguous.
Logistics center as an element of logistics infrastructure
<\/strong>Logistics infrastructure, which enables the movement of goods and the performance of operations on them during the time when movement is not taking place, consists of two basic types of elements:
– linear – which include roads, railway lines, waterways, pipelines, and telepathic infrastructure
– point – which are seaports and airports, water harbors, warehouse structures, intermodal transshipment terminals, and cargo distribution and consolidation points.
The above division, although it refers mainly to the conceptual sphere and knowledge of the basic operations performed in these facilities, is not unambiguous. In seaports, temporary storage of transshipped goods takes place, and in warehouse facilities, the separation and consolidation of goods occur, as well as activities related to their refinement: for example, sub-assembly, final assembly, or repacking. Point elements of logistics networks are characterized by a diversity of functions and the resulting richness of names, including proper names. In literature and practice, various terms are encountered that define logistics centers. Alongside the name: logistics center, the terms: logistics distribution center and logistics-distribution center are also used interchangeably [1], [2], [3].
The use of these last two names is not justified for at least two reasons:
– in a logistics center, stocks are accumulated for both production and sales purposes, and neither of these purposes is preferred by them; hence there is no reason to distinguish one of them in the name
– distribution obviously requires the implementation of specific logistics functions and is so strongly linked to them (even dependent on them) that there is no reason to separate them by name.
Numerous investments by developers building industrial facilities have introduced and popularized another concept – logistics park – used in the names of these objects, often with the addition of the location. Using the concepts: logistics center, logistics park, and even terms encountered in literature such as logistics village, logistics zone, or an enterprise calling a warehouse facility (in which it stores stocks exclusively for its own use) its logistics center, serves primarily marketing purposes, but without embedding these names in the general nomenclature context in the area of logistics, which increases the scale of misinformation and unnecessarily multiplies logistics vocabulary.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 3/2008.