Global Supply Chain Management is becoming an ever more imperative success factor as companies face the challenges of a feeble economy, product proliferation on a global scale, rapidly changing technologies, the need for improved integration of functions across their enterprise, and the battle for market share and increasing pressure to improve shareholder value.
Many opportunities exist in supply chains to create value beyond simply lowering a company’s “cost per mile” or improving labor or distribution productivity. Effective Global Supply Chains have the potential to: create increased revenues through improved customer service; provide the ability to expand into new markets; utilize capital more efficiently through reduced inventory and facilities investment minimize taxes through a well-planned global manufacturing and distribution strategy.
Effective global supply chains can certainly impact a company’s capital efficiency, and focus on ways to enhance customers’ supply chains through additional support, technology and supply chain management tools can help them anticipate change and make better business decisions to succeed in the marketplace.
International trade has flourished while undergoing a period of considerable change. Over the past 15 years, U.S. international trade alone has climbed more than 300%. This suggests a buoyant time for forwarders - a notion supported by the CEO of a top-ten freight forwarder who calls it the most prosperous time in 36 years.
Very few transportation companies have as yet got to grips with the concepts of elogistics and global supply chains. Furthermore, the firms who are attempting to build global trade solutions do not appreciate the necessity of providing their clients with a bi-directional trade system. Everyone wants to skim off what they think are the easy functionalities.
Global acquisition, global production and global sales all demand that the flow of goods must be well organized along the entire value-added chain.
Global acquisition and global sales are not possible without elogistics. If you want to make a name for yourself as a capable elogistics provider in today's expanding global market, you must act on the global level.
Logistics competence only exists if an elogistics provider can reliably organize and manage global supply chains including all communications aspects as a complex package of services.
The globalisation process has led to a constant increase in transportation demand. It's all about quality and reliability of the flow of goods - essential criteria for global acquisition and production. Competent logistics providers are needed to perform the necessary organization and control processes. In the transportation sector, growth and success are inextricably linked to competence.
The global online logistics market will expand significantly over the next four years, reaching a global value of $1 trillion by 2005 according to Forrester Research. This demand will de driven by growth in e procurement strategies, appropriate regulatory changes and the increasing globalisation of the logistics market.
Traditional freight forwarders may be perceived as potential competitors to global elogistics solutions providers, although the two are highly complementary to each other in reality. Since not all services currently offered by a freight forwarder can be digitised and delivered over the Internet, global elogistics will re intermediate traditional freight forwarders, rather than disintermediate them.
Forward-looking freight forwarders will partner with global elogistics providers and repackage their service offerings to fit the new Internet-supported economy.
In regards to this year, we will see the emergence of an end-to-end global supply chain management portal, which will link horizontal logistics functions, including transportation management, trade compliance, landed cost calculation and optimisation, and trade settlement with country-specific international trading portals. This development is nevertheless seen as still a long way off because lack of domain expertise, low levels of trust, culture differences and technology infrastructure disparity.
