If each freight shipment en route worldwide in a single day – by highway, rail, air, and sea – were a point of light, our planet would appear as an incredible snarl of illuminated string. The global economy is in constant motion as a rapidly evolving, changing, and inter-related system. Supporting this vast network of shipments is a highly sophisticated infrastructure directing and tracking the movement of goods via the Internet, underlying and enabling the new worldwide marketplace. This is the New Logistics, an amalgamation of high-tech communications and multimodal transportation services very different from what we knew a decade ago. No longer the exclusive arena of big business, the global marketplace is now available to everyone. The new logistics has levelled the world’s trading field for every business – big, medium, and small.
"Technology doesn’t drive things – business trends and processes drive logistics today," notes Larry Lapide, currently an MIT Research Affiliate, and recently retired Director of Demand Management at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics. "Few companies now control their entire supply chain today. Companies outsource not only to save on costs but to gain a competitive advantage. The trend started with big US and European companies over 20 years ago."
Today, new logistics enables small and medium businesses (SMBs) and even very small businesses, enabling them to utilize the same resources, technologies, and business practices that big companies have used for years.
See CTL Research Affiliate Larry Lapide in the UPS Logistics series of videos for the Washington Post