Logistics, whose military origins date back to the beginnings of our European civilization, is today an important and highly dynamic field of our socio-economic life, whose state of knowledge and technological advancement are a benchmark for modern business standards. Technical, organizational, and economic efficiency, as well as the effectiveness of logistics processes in every economic sector and enterprise, determine their market competitiveness. In the modern market economy, logistics, alongside quality, fundamentally differentiates products and services and determines their attractiveness and market competitiveness. Highly efficient, modern, global production systems, operating according to the McDonald’s restaurant standard, offer almost everything and immediately. Such enormous availability of production capacity results primarily from the high efficiency of the material production sector and the service sector coupled with it, which results in a huge supply of all products and goods, often exceeding real market demand. A systemic stimulator of this demand is, of course, sales marketing, which, using various sociotechniques, not to say manipulation, shapes trends and encourages less decisive customers to engage in global consumption.
This colorful world of products, goods, and services owes its market expansion largely to efficient and effective logistics, which, while performing service functions for superior supply-production-distribution systems, generally speaking, on the one hand, guarantees the delivery of supply materials, and on the other, deals with delivering finished products and goods to final consumer links in distribution channels. Optimally organized physical flows of raw materials, materials, and goods are carried out in the structure of a logistics supply chain, whose basic functional link is binary transport and storage operations. A properly organized and controlled logistics supply chain is the workhorse of modern business and largely determines the market competitiveness of entities conducting business activities.
The current level of development of logistics technologies is a derivative of natural historical processes that evolved and revolutionized in different eras and socio-economic systems throughout the material culture of human society. Almost every definition of such a cardinal concept as civilization draws attention to the primary importance of the material level of human development. The quality of life and civilizational standards are therefore determined to the highest degree by the level of scientific development and technological advancement of a given era. In the further part, we will consider the issue of the civilizational flourishing of societies, in the aspect of the participation of logistics technologies, according to the Tofflerian concept of three waves, which very vividly and extremely suggestively captures the history of the human species as a derivative of scientific and technical progress. According to historical, sociological, and economic criteria in the known history of civilization, three basic stages (waves) of the development of the human species can be distinguished, covering respectively: agricultural society (agrarian, primitive), industrial society (industrial, technical), and information society (technological). The extraordinary accuracy of Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s approach lies in the fact that by using the term wave, they consciously blurred any boundaries between individual civilizational eras, as it is difficult to find radical milestones or any temporal determinants there. The continuity of wave motion perfectly corresponds to the continuity of human generations and their civilizations.
With some simplification, it can be assumed that the breakthrough combination of events heralding the twilight of agrarian society and the birth of the second wave were the great geographical discoveries, revolutionary technical inventions of the Renaissance, and new social relations associated with mass migrations of people to industrial centers and the emergence of a new working class. The technological detonator of these trends was probably the invention of the steam engine (J. Watt, 1769), then the internal combustion engine (R. Diesel, 1897), then a whole range of electric motors (W. Siemens, 1866), up to the epochal discovery of atomic energy (A. Einstein, 1916) and the construction of the first nuclear power plants (USA, 1958). A symbolic indicator of the third wave was undoubtedly the appearance in 1945 of the first digital computer “ENIAC”, which had its own autonomous operating system and executed the application software commissioned to it. It is just a pity that in every case, the primary source carriers of energy are still natural energy raw materials, as a rule, fossil fuels such as coal, oil, gas, as well as uranium or plutonium. Unfortunately, these are natural resources of nature whose extraction potential is limited. The saving nuclear energy is still based on fossil fuels, and the prospects for mass use of the elementary element of the universe, which is hydrogen, for its production are still only theoretical. Either way, engines and the transport associated with them stimulated the civilizational development of societies almost until the end of the 20th century.
Processes, services, and standards of broadly understood logistics have accompanied the human species probably since the dawn of its civilized history. In accordance with the concept of the three Tofflerian waves of socio-economic development, the logistics existing in these structures can be appropriately labeled with the adjective: 1st wave logistics, 2nd wave logistics, and 3rd wave logistics.
1st wave logistics was aimed at meeting the requirements of an agrarian society and an economy closely related to land cultivation, agriculture, and earlier to gathering, hunting, and other natural processes supporting the vital functions of the societies of that time. The ways of overcoming space and time, so indispensable in human activity, were of course as primitive and limited as the entire material cultures of these societies. The basic production workshop was the land, and the product was its fruits, the artificial production of which gave man more and more security and development prospects. The more production and consumption were based on artificial technologies invented by man, the greater the demands placed on subsequent generations of logistics. Increasingly efficient and reliable logistics technologies opened up new cognitive horizons for man, but also new areas of social and economic expansion.
2nd wave logistics carried out the mission of the large-scale industrial development strategy of a rapidly industrializing industrial society. It had to handle large, mass flows of consumer and investment goods, the assortment diversity of which was constantly growing and generating subsequent logistics technologies. Huge mountains of raw materials and other supply materials were usually brought to large industrial regions from distant colonies and overseas territories. From there, countless industrial goods and products were transported to various recipients increasingly distant spatially from the places of production.
A revolutionary invention was the standard TEU container as a universal loading unit, initially used mainly in maritime transport. The standardization of loading units led to the creation of a standardized pallet, which significantly improved and accelerated transshipment. Following these loading units, various technical devices and vehicles designed specifically for their handling began to appear. Thanks to these types of inventions and other technologies, 2nd wave logistics could meet the high quantitative and qualitative requirements of a large-scale industrial commodity civilization.
The article comes from the journal “Logistyka” 1/2010.