from the Perspective of Competitive Advantage
by
Edwin B. Dean
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Blanchard, B. S. (1974) notes that "logistics is being viewed as the composite of all considerations necessary to assure the effective and economical support of a system throughout its programmed life cycle. ... Logistic support must be initially planned and developed as part of the overall system development process to assure an optimum balance between the prime equipment and its related support."This leads to a definition of logistics engineering in terms of the genopersisatation recursion. Based upon Blanchard's definition, this recursion suggests that the functions of logistics engineering are to:
A second important set of functions, which are related to concurrent engineering, are:
In the context of current world competition, "appropriate" is highly correlated with "competitive." An appropriate logistic support system, thus, must have low cost and high value. It must ,thus, be designed for value.
My seven years as a cost estimator taught me that the quality of the product and the architecture and quality of the logistics support system are often the major cost drivers in life cycle cost. The Taguchi quality loss function (Taguchi, 1986) provides a simplistic but appropriate model which links unquality with cost. Quality characteristics such as reliability and availability have a great deal to do with value through customer satisfaction. Thus, logistics engineering plays a very important role in designing for competitive advantage.
Logistics Engineering Bibliography
Society of Logistics Engineers (SOLE)
Georgia Tech's Logistics Engineering Center
Logistics Management Institute
Naval Logistics Home Page
Rand Logistics Reports
Table of Contents | Genopersistation of the Genopersistation | Engineering Technologies | Use