The paper was presented at the Polish Logistics Congress Logistics 2008 – “New challenges – new solutions”, Poznań, May 7-9, 2008.
Information and IT play a significant role in the logistics sector and are an essential element in the process of achieving competitive advantage by individual entities. The implementation of an effectively operating integrated supply chain requires the use of a number of solutions. These solutions are constantly evolving, offering new functionalities. Companies in the logistics sector are among the most innovative in terms of using ICT solutions. This article presents selected IT solutions that play or may soon play an important role in the operations of companies in the logistics sector.
Introduction
In a rapidly and dynamically developing economy, information is one of the most important resources. Proper, correct, and optimized information management determines the possibilities of operating on the market. Ensuring the correct flow of information and synchronization is a fundamental issue for most enterprises. This is an element that allows for increasing the company’s competitiveness on the market.
Logistics departments of manufacturing and trading companies, as well as companies providing logistics services, which, depending on the business profile, include units dealing with warehousing, transport, planning, and purchasing, deal with a very large flow of information and data. Information about products for which production plans are created, as well as about raw materials and materials for them and orders, must be processed and handled by the companies’ IT systems. Delivering cargo to the enterprise, delivering it to production lines, and then warehousing and distributing goods are business processes that are of fundamental importance for the proper functioning of the enterprise. Therefore, IT is an indispensable element of the functioning of logistics companies. The development of warehouse and logistics applications is one of the most dynamically developing fields in the IT industry.
A number of different IT solutions are used in the logistics industry. Some of them are typical solutions also used in other industries, and some are strictly specialized, dedicated to the logistics sector. This article presents selected technologies and solutions that, in the authors’ opinion, play or may play an important role in the logistics sector in the future. They are presented in the figure below, divided into three main groups:
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solutions supporting cooperation between enterprises,
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solutions supporting enterprise operations,
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solutions enabling monitoring and tracking of shipments and vehicles.
Arrows indicate the areas where individual solutions are applied. RFID and GIS technologies have been assigned to two groups, as they can be practically applied throughout the entire integrated supply chain.
The solutions mentioned above both support logistics and influence its proper functioning, ensuring, among other things, efficient cargo flow, minimization of warehouse space, forecasting and planning of flows, means of transport, and efficient document circulation.
Solutions supporting cooperation between enterprises
Managing an integrated supply chain is a key aspect of the operation of logistics companies. For this reason, cooperation between individual elements of this chain is very important, especially with suppliers, recipients, shipping companies, couriers, or logistics operators. It was realized long ago that IT systems play a very important role in this cooperation.
One of the first systems for exchanging data in formats described by international standards between the IT systems of trading partners, with minimal human intervention, was the EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) system, which is still used today. It allows for the exchange of data between various types of forms, including those created in different languages. Furthermore, it enables the elimination of paper documents, increasing the efficiency of all activities related to trade. EDI is a relatively simple way to carry out commercial transactions while avoiding the tedious work of creating, copying, and sending paper documents. It is a bridge that directly connects the IT systems of cooperating companies, e.g., by transferring information contained in typical commercial documents. The use of standard and globally accepted data formats ensures that all participants in the exchange use the same language. An EDI document is the equivalent of a paper commercial document with a fixed international form, which has been adapted for electronic data transmission purposes and functions independently of the type of user software. The use of EDI is not limited by differences in the software that trading partners use in their enterprises. In addition to EDI, other standards have also been created to standardize document exchange. These include: ebXML, Rosettanet, UMM (Unified Modeling Methodology).
Another example is electronic platforms supporting the execution of transactions. They take the form of portals containing information about manufacturers and their products. They also allow for placing an order, thus saving the time of a purchasing department employee who would otherwise have to spend it searching for offers in the traditional way. These portals can take the form of publicly available (public) ones or are created directly for the needs of a given enterprise (corporation). It is believed that Polish enterprises are increasingly using this type of solution for e-procurement, i.e., making purchases through internet portals.
For many years, work has been underway on solutions that would support the conduct of commercial transactions between enterprises in the internet environment. To achieve this goal, the SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) architecture was proposed, which is intended to significantly facilitate the cooperation of various applications. SOA architecture is a collection of independent services and components that perform various business functions. Individual services can be called and used concurrently with other services, including external systems supporting this architecture. Thanks to this, once written functionality can be reused and easily integrated with other services. The popularity of SOA is evidenced by forecasts from the Gartner group, which estimates that by 2009, service-oriented programming will be the dominant method of software development, used in over 80% of new projects. In logistics, SOA, as a reliable and flexible service, is used to support complex logistics chains.
A special case of implementing SOA architecture is Web Services technology, which enables the integration of various applications. Web Services are software components representing business functions available to other applications (client, server, or another service) via a public network and using generally available, common internet protocols and transports. The basis of Web Services standards is the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) standard, according to which three basic mechanisms operate: SOAP (Simple Access Open Protocol), WSDL (Web Services Description Language), and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration). Several standardization organizations are responsible for the development of Web Services technology, setting as their goal the design of a set of specifications allowing an enterprise of any size, from any branch of the economy, to conduct business with any other entity, in any sector of the economy, all over the world.
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