An interview with Professor Wojciech Cellary
Lucyna Zaborowska-Princ
: The application of modern IT solutions is essential today for the smooth and effective operation of virtually every organization, especially in the area of logistics. Consequently, a lot of attention is devoted to issues of new IT projects and the expansion of existing tools, which is also appropriately reflected in corporate budgets. At the same time, logistics is the area in companies where there is a strong
search for ways to reduce costs. Given these conflicting expectations, it becomes very important to clearly define the role of IT in logistics, and in particular its contribution to creating and maintaining a competitive advantage. What is this role?
Wojciech Cellary
: There is a fundamental link between the IT solutions used and the ability to gain a competitive advantage through logistics. Logistics consists of organizing and managing the supply of material products that are dispersed over a certain territorial area. For obvious reasons, the delivery of material products requires time. Electronic information transmitted via the Internet and other telecommunications networks, however, is practically not subject to time and space constraints. In other words, electronic information about a certain fact important to an enterprise, which occurs anywhere in an arbitrarily large territorial area, reaches the logistics decision-making center practically immediately after its creation. Transmitting it is always faster than transporting any material product. Moreover – information can precede certain facts. For example, the logistics decision-making center can receive not only information about the production of a given product and its placement in a warehouse on an ongoing basis, but also advance information about current production plans. IT therefore allows for building a precise and constantly updated picture of entire supply chains and networks. This picture is the basis for optimizing supply management, which directly translates into increased revenue and lower costs. It is worth noting that the means and conditions of transport are very similar in all companies – the trucks of competing enterprises are similar, driving on the same roads, the goods of competing enterprises are carried by the same railways on the same tracks, and very similar planes use the same airports. It is therefore difficult to build a competitive advantage on transport. Today, such an advantage is determined by the ability to acquire and process information. This combination of current information on supply, demand, and transport capabilities is crucial for gaining a competitive advantage. An enterprise that acquires this information faster – that is, more automatically – and can make better use of it – that is, make better management decisions based on it – wins in the market. The battle for logistics is a battle for electronic information.
The article comes from the magazine