Developments in Logistics and Supply Chain Management: Past, Present and Future PDF by Kulwant S. Pawar, Helen Rogers, Andrew Potter and Mohamed Naim

Contents

Introduction
Over the last couple of decades, the whole domain and discipline of logistics and supply chain has developed quite significantly. If one reflects back to the early 1990s, logistics had its roots firmly within the context of inbound and outbound transport and warehousing. The whole sector was fragmented, unorganised and run by a number of small operators, and the concept of third party logistics did not exist.

In fact, the term “logistics” was often labelled as “sheds and lorries”. On the other hand, there was a realisation of the importance of getting the right goods to the right place at the right time and at the right quality.

In parallel, during the early 1990s, there was huge debate surrounding the so-called new environment of intensified global competition, the removal of national barriers and the emergence of regional trading blocks such as the Single Market in Europe, the Pacific Rim, Continental America and the opening up of Eastern Europe and the Russian subcontinent. All of this was creating new challenges and opportunities for businesses and, indeed, for expanding and professionalising logistical operations. Thus, many organisations sought to focus their attention on managing logistics more efficiently.

Similarly, professional bodies like institutes and societies were focused on production planning, materials management, purchasing and production management, etc., and the term “logistics” was still not used extensively until mid-1990s. Equally, there was a lack of attention to logistics within various courses at universities and higher educational institutes. Logistics was considered to be part of materials and production management courses with a few odd exceptions where logistics was taught as a module within a course on production or operations management. In early 1992, a proposal was made to the United Kingdom’s Operations Management Association (OMA), which subsequently expanded as the European Operations Management Association (EurOMA), to provide support for the launch of the inaugural International Symposium on Logistics (ISL) in Nottingham, UK, in July 1993. The launch of ISL came about from the growing realisation that a common forum to bring together and stimulate the exchange of ideas between academic research and industrial practice did not exist. Previous similar events had tended to be rather focused in the area of operations, materials or inventory management, and there was a need to bridge this gap. After the success of 1993, subsequent ISL events were held in Nottingham in 1995, Padua in 1997 and Florence in 1999. There was a huge interest from the Japanese academic community to organise ISL 2000 in Iwate, which proved to be an even bigger success. This also led to the concept of alternating ISL between Europe and outside Europe on an annual basis.

To date, this event has been held in Salzburg (2001), Melbourne (2002), Seville (2003), Bangalore (2004), Lisbon (2005), Beijing (2006), Budapest (2007), Bangkok (2008), Istanbul (2009), Kuala Lumpur (2010), Berlin (2011), Cape Town (2012), Vienna (2013) and Ho Chi Minh City (2014), with the 20th ISL being planned in Bologna in July 2015. The papers in this book have been carefully selected from the 19 proceedings of ISL to celebrate this 20th anniversary. It has become a regular, well-established and premier international event in the field of Logistics and Supply Chain Management. To date, over 1700 papers have been published in the conference proceedings; hence, making it a very difficult and challenging task to select the papers to be included in this book. The title “Developments is Logistics and Supply Chain: Past, Present and Future” has been chosen to reflect a collection of the most influential contributions from the last two decades. These contributions also reflect wider research activity being undertaken within the logistics and supply chain community.