The importance of logistics.

“Logistics means having the right thing, at the right place, at the right time” (Logistics World). The term logistics is very popular nowadays. A job in this area becomes promoted too. There are more and more companies that propose these kinds of service. There are already high institutions that prepare correspondent experts for this area; they developed under- and postgraduate programs for such students. Nowadays there are professional associations that have a right to certify them. The importance of logisticians as exerts in logistics is evident, because the globalization increased a need of different issues movement around the world. Moreover, there are huge companies that possess premises / offices far from one another and need their items to transport from one premise to another. “Recognition of the true costs of inventory has led many enterprises to decrease inventory levels, thereby creating tightly-coupled supply chains that can react faster but require more and different skills to put together and improve continually. Furthermore, such tightly couples supply chains are more vulnerable to breakdowns and interruptions, thus requiring closer monitoring and higher skill levels to operate” (Sheffi & Klaus). As clients’ demand regarding time, quality, price, etc. are rising, a logistician needs to find new ways out. The environmental issues should be treated and solved as well, the question is regarding recycling, safe disposal, etc. It is important that this kind of experts master information and communication technologies, equipment identification, e-data interchange, planning and support systems in order their logistic company could be competitive. Moreover, such experts can plan the movement of necessary items in the most economic and structured way (without bureaucracy). To be more specific, logistics ‘deals’ with resources flows among the start and end points. Under ‘flow of resources’ one should understand the delivery of different items, irrespective whether it is physical or abstract, from one point to another. Physical items include different kinds of materials, food (including liquids), various equipment; the abstract items can contain, for example, information, energy, etc. Surely, this list is not full and can be prolonged significantly. The New Oxford American Dictionary specifies logistics as “the detailed coordination of a complex operation involving many people, facilities, or supplies”. As a result, this area is very often connected to engineering. The term came from France from nineteenth century. They used a word ‘logistique’. It is interesting to know that logistics was developed in order to serve military needs, i.e. to supply ammunition, arms, etc. Ancient Greeks, Romans, Byzantines paid the so-called Logistikas, who were military officers and played a role of existing logistics system ‘chiefs’.If the term is ‘comparatively’ new, the service itself is rather ‘old’ one, because the analyses of civilizations creation shows that different things had been moved in ancient times already. It is another matter that transports system development furthered significantly to logistics evolution, because people started to move more intensively. These two were very connected at the beginning, but later the infrastructure growth as well as record-keeping ‘weakened’ such a relation. The …