Wikinomics

Perspectives in Supply Chain Management: The Physical Internet

* Globalization requires greatly increased co-ordination of transport by road, rail, sea, air and now also by an entirely new route to market: the internet. Logistics tends to be tactical, supply-chain management is strategic.

* Transforming the way physical object are handled, stored, moved, realized, supplied and used, aiming towards global efficiency and sustainability.

* Moving physical goods through the supply chain in the same way we move digital information across the Internet.

* A lot of wasted effort getting a product from Point A to Point B in today’s supply chain that results from a lack of global standards as well as a lack of coordination

* From an economical prospective, the way goods are flowed are hugely costly. In most developed countries, it accounts for a significant fraction of the gross national product.

* Trucks, wagons and containers are often half empty at departure, with a large portion of the non-emptiness being filled by packaging. Vehicles and containers often return empty, or incur extra travel routes to find return shipments.

* Manufacturers, distributors, retailers and users are all storing products, often in vast quantities through their networks of warehouses and distribution centers, yet service levels and response times to local users are constraining and unreliable.

* Products commonly travel thousands of miles that could have been avoided by routing them smartly and\or making them much nearer to their point of use. The outsourcing of product manufacturing has accentuated this phenomenon.

* There is extreme concentration of operations in limited number of production and distribution facilities, with travel along a narrow set of routes. This makes logistics networks and supply chains of so many businesses, unsecure in face of terrorism acts, and robust in face of natural disasters and demand crises.

* Supply-chain management is...