Due to the fact that the innovative activity of almost all industries is currently linked in some way to concepts such as “e-business” and “e-commerce”, this article serves as a contribution to the analysis of the impact of information technology on enterprise logistics systems.
1. Introduction: data/signals → messages → information
The current global economic development (responding to the challenges of the “new economy”) points – under conditions of strong international competition – to the existence of a very rich range of management techniques aimed at improving the quality of enterprise operations (see tab. 1). The reorganization of enterprises, with a view to optimally shaping value creation processes, is accompanied by highly innovative ventures, particularly in the field of information and communication technologies, as well as the dynamic development of application software for immediate widespread industrial use in the sphere of e-business (e.g., using Intranet, Internet, VAN, EDI, EDIFACT, Web EDI information technologies), which, of course, does not remain without influence on the globalization of contacts between enterprises, industries, and entire spheres of the world economy (fig. 1). The development trends of current macroeconomic solutions force export enterprises to significantly reorient their style of cooperation with foreign sales markets. Instead of carrying out simple deliveries to established sales markets, enterprises are forced to develop more complex, multi-directional cooperative ties with foreign partners. Many of them have located – in accordance with this requirement – their production and assembly plants in the area of the existing sales market, in order to import from there a number of semi-finished products, finished parts, and pre-assembled sub-assemblies. At the root of this type of globalization of supply (→ generates logistics costs) and production (→ generates production costs) lie various premises, based on avoiding problems (resulting, for example, from high production costs at home, exchange rate risks, import barriers, etc.) or on achieving a higher degree of acceptance from customers, thanks to close presence and optimal service for end users. For this reason, enterprises strive – as part of reorganization – to increase the efficiency of the entire physical logistics chain – that is, internal and external partial systems, in terms of data and material flow.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2001/2.