The essence and importance of logistics services in the economy
The condition for identifying the specific nature of services, which significantly indicates their difference from material goods, is a set of their characteristics (intangibility, simultaneity of the provision and consumption process, heterogeneity, perishability, inability to acquire ownership of services, substitutability, and complementarity). The relative importance of individual characteristics varies and depends, among other things, on the type of service, the place and time of its provision, and the entity providing the service. Sometimes these characteristics are influenced by the service recipients themselves, as well as other factors such as historical, social, economic conditions, etc.
The same conditions apply to logistics services, whose main task is to satisfy the logistics needs of economic entities and the population. A logistics service is a specific product that contains a set of customer wishes and expectations. In this interpretation, a logistics service constitutes the organization by an external company of the process of transporting and storing products, along with full formal and legal handling. In this reasoning, it should be emphasized that a logistics service is not identical to a classic transport or forwarding service, because it contains a much broader scope of service. Analogously, logistics enterprises provide a much wider range of services than enterprises providing basic transport services or pure forwarding. However, it should be noted that the palette of logistics services usually includes a transport service, which results from the substitutability of logistics services for transport services. Hence, the scope of logistics services includes various remunerated services from the forwarding, transport, and warehousing industries, along with a full range of so-called related services and those that support and streamline the process of goods flow in the logistics system.
The role of services in the economy took on a special dimension when the development of enterprises became conditioned by the desire to possess the most modern (including the most efficient) technical and organizational solutions. The result of this is the increasingly common use by manufacturing and service enterprises of offers from external companies (outsourcing), also in relation to logistics services.
Scope of logistics services in water transport
The modern approach to transport management, in relation to all branches of transport, postulates a holistic approach to the process of moving cargo. This also applies to water transport, for which the postulate of integrating activities in the transport process concerns not viewing (narrowing) it only as a connection from port to port, but emphasizes treating this transport as one of the segments of the logistics chain in transport operations, where, as in every branch of transport, the carriage begins at the cargo sender and ends at the recipient. The presented approach to the functioning of water transport constitutes a determinant of its competitiveness, as it contributes to improving the handling of transport processes. This is possible in the situation of direct transport from domestic ports, as well as the takeover by water transport of a larger quantity of transported cargo in domestic and international relations from road transport. Due to the fact that in such an approach the cargo is efficiently transported in the logistics chain from the sender to the recipient, almost (door-to-door), this significantly improves cargo handling parameters in ports, increases their competitiveness, and thus favorably influences the development of short-sea shipping. The European Union’s particular emphasis on promoting this type of shipping is a result of seeing in it the possibility of being an alternative to the road transport dominating in Europe and distributing the burden of cargo transported by it to other branches of transport. The realization of the tasks imposed on short-sea shipping is largely dependent on the service offer of seaports. This concerns various port services, starting from the traditional service functions of a seaport (mainly ship handling), up to complex logistics services provided for the cargo owner. Assuming that ports are to become basic and active elements of land-sea logistics chains, then in their service package, apart from transshipment, they must offer all other competitive areas of activity. Ports, already at this moment, adapting to market requirements, have become a natural place for the concentration of several planes of economic activity: transport, production, trade, and distribution. This causes the necessity for the emergence of logistics clusters integrally linked with ports, which will be able to provide customers with such a service offer that will have a new qualitative dimension. This new dimension is the provision of port and logistics services in a system of increasing requirements regarding speed, punctuality, reliability, and comprehensiveness. A logistics cluster in its offer includes the provision of transport, storage, forwarding, transshipment, and warehousing services, and has the ability to perform so-called additional services provided for the cargo: repacking, refining, forming batches for smaller recipients, certification, and others. To ensure a high level of quality of these services, it is necessary that all activities in the port be carried out by specialized enterprises.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 4/2009.