The fast-evolving Information Technology industry holds an increasing place in today's business environment. Organizations allocate bigger budgets to IT infrastructure as they seek to differentiate themselves from their competitors. As part of the business activities, logistics has encompassed this tendency, and IT becomes an essential issue in logistics today. Real-time communication, tracking and tracing of goods, forecasting consumer sales, planning and controlling, is nowadays achieved in no small extent using Information Technology.
Information technology appears to hold an important place in most current logistics systems. This place has increased over the last decades and is presumed to get even more significant as future technology can propose new possibilities. IT's technology not only holds and transmits data but can also exercise routine decision rules. In today's global supply chain, the product flow is controlled and managed by automated technology. In such a case, the reliability of a whole chain flow relies on the operational safety of the underlying IT systems. In other words, the logistics process reliability depends on IT performances.
There is a mixture of technological trends and innovations that affect the application of information technology in logistics. However, the prominent trends can be classified into four key themes. These points are essential to the current and future use of information technology to promote logistics operations across all industry sectors.
The four key topics are concerned with:
Integration and Flexibility:- Advanced transaction processing systems that approach the needs of an entire organization are now standard. These systems facilitate management to monitor inventory at all locations throughout the organization, including various warehouses in multiple countries. Integrated systems are now accessible, rendering real-time visibility of demand forecast information, inventory levels, and production schedules. Once these systems have been combined successfully to sophisticated decision support systems, supply chain managers can handle the traditional supply chain trade offs dynamically.
EDI:- Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) relates to the structured delivery of data in between organizations by electronic means. It is utilized to transfer electronic documents from one computer system to another, i.e., from one trading partner to another trading partner. It is more than mere Email. As an instance, companies might replace bills of shipping and even checks with appropriate EDI.
Hardware Communications Technology:- The decreases in computer memory and processor size over the last 25 years have been dramatic. Equally dramatic reductions have been met by these exciting improvements in hardware performance in hardware costs. One of the key benefits of these hardware trends is that computing power can now be executed in parts of the supply chain previously never considered. It was either because of cost limitations, or space constraints, or both. One such example is the use of hand-held barcode scanners. They have added to the growth in the use of labeling and automatic identification of products and places.
Conclusion
The world is narrowing day by day with the advancement of technology. Customers' expectations are also growing, and companies are prone to more and more unpredictable environment. The IT field is growing and developing every passing day. New technologies in computers and mobile devices cast the way the world communicates with one another, spends free time, and gets work done. Companies will find that their traditional supply chain integration will have to be expanded beyond their peripheries, utilizing logistics IT solutions.
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