Press Report

Digitalisation of global flow of goods requires fully new processes and thought approaches from logistics service providers and from their customers. This is the quintessential basis of this year's Swiss Logistics Forum, hosted by DHL Logistics (Switzerland).

(Handelszeitung 06.2008) The logistics sector has seen substantial change over the past years and decades. From simple transport service providers, logisticians developed into comprehensive partners of customers across the area of transport. The trend for outsourcing, the ever-more complex management of shipments (safety regulations, liability, quality management), the growing mergers and fusions and finally the resiting of production locations primarily in the direction of Eastern Europe and Asia have provided completely new demands from customers upon logistics service providers, according to Thomas Christ, Manager Director DHL Global Forwarding and DHL Logistics (Switzerland) AG.

Creating new processes

Apart from the physical flow of goods, the data flow and more recently the financial flow also joined in; they require completely new processes and procedures along the whole value chain. According to Thomas Christ's words, apart from the classical outsourcing of traditional working processes, new processes must be generated that control and coordinate all activities concerned with transport, rather than just simple transport itself. This so-called control tower should provide for a consolidated data flow along the total supply chain. As Christ says, "it must be able to comprehensively map the total transport process”. This procedure provides many benefits such as process and cost optimisation, cost transparency, an increase in quality (reduction of error sources) and finally a high visibility of streams of goods. This is required particularly by customers today. Since the control tower philosophy also contains several difficult tasks, new processes have to be put into flow.

Universal optimisation

Oswald Werle, Managing Partner of inet-logistics GmbH, underscored the fact that with Supply Chain Execution (SCE) a universal optimisation of the supply chain could be realised that takes into account all partners and that is based on a web-based neutral IT solution. This results in lower costs, higher supply security, greater transparency and more flexibility across the entire supply chain. Werle emphasised that web-based solutions for Supply Chain Execution are not hype, but rather will become a standard for universal logistics management over the coming years.