Holistic management for tremendous success

Numerous activities and processes must be managed within a company. To satisfy customers and to be commercially successful, these activities and processes must be optimally coordinated. The idea was taken up in the 1980s and became known in academic research as supply chain orientation. This form of management now plays a dominant role in related academic areas and in the daily world of business. Supply chain methods are widely applied in logistics as well.

Thinking in processes and value chains

Key factors that contribute to a company’s survival and success include the efficient use of material, financial and personnel resources, the optimization of functions, research and development, as well as product innovation. To ensure long-term success, optimization of subsections is far from the only critical element. Above all, thinking and acting within broad contexts play a major role as well.
One particularly crucial component of successful company management is the linking of commercial activities that facilitate customer satisfaction. These activities have a major impact on production costs, quality, a company’s reaction time and its adaptability to changing business and market conditions.
This realization, promoted around the world in particular by the writings of Harvard Professor Michael Porter in the 1980s, is known as process orientation and “supply chain thinking”) (as well as “process thinking,” “value chain thinking,” “flow system thinking”). It is becoming a bigger part of companies’ vocabularies and actions.
Logistics is the field where the knowledge and methods of holistic, systematically optimized process and supply chain design, management and mobilization are collected and applied.

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