Logistics Strategy

There have been numerous reports done on Global Logistics and Strategy, including general logistics, inventory, reverse logistics, warehousing and storage, order processing and information systems, human resources and organisational issues, location analysis and quality management. Not as many have been done on the operations of a global company in different geographic regions, and the external environments effect on group strategy and management.

Improving the operational competitive advantage has become a priority for many of todays companies in this age of globalization, and one of the strategies for achieving this is through global process management and standardization (Manrodt & Vitasek, 2004). However, standardization is only possible with similar quality 'ingredients', thus as companies need to take into account differences such as cultural or geographic differences, these are definitely not similar qualities. Rodrigues, Stank & Lynch (2004) also touched on same criteria in their study to present and test a framework for supply chain logistics integration, to fuse current logistics thinking with established theory of organizational design and portraying performance as an outcome of a best fit alignment between strategy, structure and processes.

These studies etsablished a good starting point for a generic framework for standardized strategies and processes in a global environment which a lot of other studies also focus on. What was not touched on was the impact of those which cannot be standardized specifically due to geographic region which this study will attempt to analyse. Focus here as already mentioned will be more on a European originated company operating in a developing country. This will be examined along the lines of the external factors or interaction of the company with its environment as identified by Chan, Yung & Burns (2000) in their study on 'Environment-Strategy