Why transport and logistics can determine competitive advantage
<\/strong>Peter Drucker – the late management guru, in the management paradigms for the 21st century published in “Forbes” magazine, points to two circumstances that create a context for considerations on the role of comodal transport: first: Drucker argues that technologies, markets, and applications are no longer limited to a given field of the economy, but permeate and connect with each other – which results in shorter production depth, a higher degree of specialization, as well as fragmentation of production and the growing role of transport in overcoming the time-space gap separating producers and consumers, second: Drucker notes that the globalization of the economy is taking place, and consequently, the distances that must be covered for the products of many manufacturers to create a finished product and then reach consumers create the need to combine transport by different modes of transport, requiring increasingly greater skills to organize transport processes in such a way as to ensure their efficiency and low price with high quality of service.<\/p>
Regardless of the type of products manufactured, the distance from sources of raw materials, the location of production sites relative to markets, and other conditions, there is always a so-called time-space gap. The processes of globalization, which characterize the nature of the modern economy, cause this gap to increase significantly in the spatial dimension. It means that carrying out activities to ensure the delivery of raw materials to places where they are processed into final products, and these to places of use and consumption, requires particularly good planning of activities from a logistics perspective. The economic crisis causes market participants to look for opportunities to reduce operating costs at all stages of producing goods or providing services. At the beginning of 2009, Europe found itself in a specific situation of needing to strengthen its economic attractiveness in the face of the use of protectionist elements in their national economies by the USA, Canada, or some large Asian countries. In these actions, logistics can prove to be a key competence.<\/p>
Logistics ensures the physical availability of materials, semi-finished products, and final products through the logistics service of suppliers and recipients, often referred to as customer logistics service. As a reminder – the goals of logistics, both on a macro and micro scale, include:<\/p>
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shortening delivery times,<\/div>
<\/li>high utilization of infrastructure and personnel,<\/div>
<\/li>fast, error-free flow of information,<\/div>
<\/li>improvement of the management process,<\/div>
<\/li>reduction of inventories,<\/div>
<\/li>elimination of intermediate links,<\/div>
<\/li>improvement of customer service levels,<\/div>
<\/li>reduction of goods flow costs.<\/div>
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<\/ul>Therefore, ensuring availability is not possible without properly organized transport.
The degree of synchronization and coordination of transport processes can significantly affect the aforementioned level of customer service, which in turn translates into the competitive position not only of an individual enterprise but of entire economies. Hence, the importance of efficient transport in modern logistics is growing. The requirements of both shippers and recipients regarding the quality of transport services are rapidly increasing, especially in terms of shortening transport time, increasing cargo safety, and ensuring the multimodal nature of the transport process, i.e., efficient and economically effective service by individual modes of transport.<\/p>The essence of multimodality and comodality and the relationships between them
<\/strong>The degree of organization and integration of transport is of significant importance from the point of view of its efficiency and usefulness for achieving logistics goals. Such model solutions include multimodal transport. In the subject literature, we find many different definitions of multimodal transport, often equated with intermodal or combined transport. The following definitions function in the subject literature:
Multimodal transport<\/em> – means the carriage of goods using at least two different modes of transport on the basis of a single multimodal transport contract, from a place located where the multimodal transport operator took charge of the goods, to a designated place of destination. Such a definition was proposed by the 1980 Convention on International Multimodal Transport of Goods. This convention did not enter into force because only 8 countries ratified it, but the definition of multimodal transport contained therein gained widespread approval.<\/p>The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2\/2009.<\/p>