Logistics Management and Strategy - 3rd Edition

 

A car takes only 20 hours or so to assemble, and a couple more days are needed to ship it to the customer via the dealers. So why does it take more than a month for a manufacturer to make and deliver the car I want? And why are the products I want to buy so often unavailable on the shelf at the local supermarket? These are questions that go to the heart of logistics management and strategy. Supply chains today are slow and costly compared with what they will be like in a few years’ time. But let us start at the beginning, by thinking about logistics and the

supply chain in terms of what they are trying to do. It is easy to get bogged down in the complexities of how a supply chain actually works (and very few people actually know how a whole supply chain works!). We shall address many of those details later in this book. First, let us focus on how a supply chain competes, and on what the implications are for logistics management and strategy.