Solved: Research the following topics related to global supply chain management- logistics, wms

Global Logistics

Today, all forms of business have crossed their respective national borders and emerged as a global opportunity. Due to the rapid change in information and technology, the world has become a global village. Global logistics has also become a focal point for the companies for quite some time. Here, speed and efficiency have been the major issues related to the global logistics and they depend on the available modes of transportation, their capacity and capability, inter-modal facility for movement, packaging, and handling, and logistical regulations in countries where the buyers, sellers, and carriers are located. In import and export business, for the physical movement of cargo, role intermediaries—freight for-warders and customs-house brokers—is indispensable. The three essential factors which need special attention is global logistics are – the domain knowledge, connectivity with international cargo carriers, and documentation.

When the companies are involved in global logistics, there are increasing complexities. The complexities vary according to the environment where the companies are operating. Moreover, the solution to these complexities is not always uniformly applicable for all the companies because they depend on their individual strategies and managerial issues. Companies can choose to minimize their cost of customer service as a constraint or they can choose to maximize the customer service having the cost as the constraint. Depending upon the strategy the solutions can vary. The choices of modern times global logistics are, however, numerous. It ranges from 3D printing, UAVs, driverless vehicles, to the Internet of Things. Apart from these operational factors, the system of World trade has advanced to a great deal and organizations such as WTO is continuously putting efforts to make the barriers vanish in global trades. Improved digitization and the regulatory leniency have reduced the documentation which earlier used to be a high-cost area of global logistics.

Warehouse Management

As far a the global market for warehouse management is concerned, it will grow exponentially in the coming years. While today the market size is 1.6 billion dollars, by 2024, it will cross 4.2 billion dollars (Statista, 2017). Warehousing and warehouse management will be one of the crucial parts of the integrated logistics management of the global companies. Many important aspects including the transportation planning/execution, engineered labor standards, slotting, yard management, supply chain visibility, event management, and trading partner integration will be included in this integrated modules. WMS has (and will further) transformed into a digital service package where the complexities have grown from mere maintaining the inventory to technology-related issues such as distributed software, software customization, application integration, varying platforms, varying protocols, numerous devices, the Internet, etc. All these issues have been taken care of by the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Due to the same reason, WMS suppliers are integrating horizontally and the market is consolidating from quite some time.

In today’s context, the buzzwords of WMS are Customized Warehousing, Application cloud computing and SaaS, and use of RFID technology for traceability. All of these are aimed at delivering an on-demand supply chain execution and lowered cost of acquisition (note that the rental cost of cloud computing compared to the total acquisition system of the internal server-based computing system comes lesser). There exists a tremendous future potential for the development and innovation as far as the WMS and its effect in the global supply chain is concerned and that is why the growth rate of the WMS market is predicted exponential. But again the companies selection of technology or warehousing plan depends on the internal strategy, environment, and nature of the market/ product/ service that whether it wants to pursue a cost-based strategy or whether the responsiveness is more crucial.