Logistics, the trend-blazing pioneer

For a company to be successful, the ability to react promptly to customer requests is becoming increasingly important. As a result of today’s tremendous technical advances, products take less time to develop and spend less time in the marketplace. As the architect of modern value chains, logistics provides tailored concepts that help optimize product development and order processing times as well as companies’ reaction times.

Reacting immediately to new demands

More than 10 years ago, George Stalk, an American working at the Boston Consulting Group, announced the transition from cost- and price-based competition to “time-based competition.” In doing so, he summed up a development that had been brewing for some time: that a company’s success was becoming more dependent on its ability to react immediately to customer requests. Furthermore, new technologies are being developed faster and faster in many areas. The result: The time frame for technologies or individual products to be commercially successful is becoming shorter. The reason for this development is that they are being crowded out by innovations more quickly.
“Moore’s Law” is a much-quoted and a particularly extreme example of developments in the microelectronic industry. According to this law, processing speed will double in every product generation while the price of this speed will be cut in half. As a result, factories that produce a certain generation of microchips grow obsolete in an increasingly shorter period of time - and with them the PCs and the numerous other products based on a chip generation.

Speed as the best condition

In the past, companies with the most reasonably priced products usually were particularly successful in the marketplace. Today, though, quick reaction time is the key factor. Companies are successful primarily when they can react especially rapidly to the needs of their customers and can be the first to bring a new technology or a new product to the market. This applies in particular to the computer, telecommunications and fashion businesses and, to a less extent, to many other economic sectors.
The concepts and technologies used in modern logistics do their part to boost product-development and order-processing times as well as reaction time by companies.
As experts for the architecture of intelligent, modular supply and value chains (or “supply chains” Supply chain ) logisticians have taken on responsibility for a new, important area.

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