The article discusses the application of outsourcing in the area of organizational logistics, including organizations in the SME sector. The presented results were developed based on the author’s systematic research on the application of outsourcing in the functioning of organizations. Selected aspects of outsourcing application in small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector organizations were identified.
The conclusions presented regarding the use of outsourcing in the logistics area of micro-enterprises (family businesses, artisans) in various sectors seem particularly significant. The application of outsourcing for logistics functions in the service sector, where many micro-enterprises operate, remains very important.
Categories related to the SME sector appeared as part of harmonization with European Union legislation. The small and medium-sized enterprise sector includes entities conducting business activity, regardless of their legal form. Very interesting in this area remain self-employed individuals, family businesses, including those dealing with services, and crafts.
The SME sector remains a very dynamically developing sector, primarily due to:
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great potential for dynamically meeting customer needs in a turbulent environment,
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short reaction time to changing market conditions in the space where the SME company operates,
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a small number of interactions within the company,
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a small number of problems resulting from the coordination of individual areas of the company’s functioning.
SME sector companies are developing particularly dynamically in the area of broadly understood services and crafts, where individualization in meeting the needs of service recipients takes on special significance. One of the distinguishing features of the small and medium-sized enterprise sector is the communication between the company and customers, which in the vast majority of cases is personalized. In the analyzed literature in the field of logistics, the issues related to logistics in SME sector companies, as well as micro-enterprises – artisans, are not strongly emphasized. This provides a good basis for developing selected aspects of the application of outsourcing in the logistics area of companies in this very sector. For the considerations in this article, definitions developed by M. Ciesielski were adopted, who defines logistics in three meanings, namely:
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activities serving the flow of goods and information / flows of raw materials, materials in progress, finished products, and goods, as well as related information,
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a field of management (management related to the flow of goods and information),
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knowledge about the above-mentioned flows and the management related to them.
Very interesting, in the aspect of performing logistics functions in the sector of small, medium, and micro-enterprises, is the characterization presented by Coyle, Bardi, and Langley. In the 1970s and 1980s, more and more companies began to notice additional savings opportunities as a result of combining the supply sphere (materials management) with the distribution sphere (physical distribution). Combining the supply sphere with the distribution sphere was referred to as business logistics, or simply a logistics system. Initially, this provided some savings – one transport manager coordinated both internal and external transport. After 1980, when the transport deregulation process began, the possibilities of negotiating transport rates with carriers on the supply and distribution side were much better. This influenced the reduction of transport rates and the improvement of transport service. Companies also realized the possibility of looking at the entire process – starting from raw materials, through work-in-progress inventory, to finished products – as a single whole, which, when managed systematically, becomes more efficient. Including purchasing in supply logistics significantly increased the possibilities for cost reduction.
The presented approach to logistics remains very interesting in the context of the small, medium, and micro-enterprise sector. Ongoing work to strengthen SME sector companies, whether through government strategies or programs funded by EU funds, increasingly “forces” companies in this sector to adopt the behavior described above. This is also influenced by cooperation with market partners using selected modern logistics procedures, which determines the creative behavior of SME sector companies in the area of logistics. Two concepts that remain important from the point of view of the discussed issues should also be defined, namely: supply chain and enterprise logistics system.
The article comes from the “Logistyka” magazine 4/2009.