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In early 1990, American President Companies started double-stack container rail service from Woodhaven, Michigan to Ford Motor Company’s auto assembly plant in Hermosillo, Mexico. APC coordinates all the information, transportation, and inventory handling necessary to pick up parts and components from vendors and sequence-load them into containers for delivery on a just-in-time basis to Hermosillo. The movement includes coordination over four railroads and with Mexican customs officials for delay-free clearance. At the plant, Ford has built a state-of-the-art stack train terminal to smooth the flow of sequenced parts into assembly operations. APC provides cranes and management to break down the containers. The partners collaborate to return containers to the United States carrying components produced in the Maquiladora region and specialized part racks.
- A warehouse service venture of Lever Brothers and Distribution Centers, Inc. is bearing fruit. DCI has built, staffed, and operates a high-tech dedicated distribution warehouse for the toiletries maker in Columbus, Ohio. The companies share the benefits and risks: if warehouse utilization falls below a certain point, Lever helps cover the overhead; in return, DCI shares the productivity benefits when utilization approaches full-capacity economies of scale. A similar arrangement exists between Lever Brothers and Dry Storage Corporation in Atlanta.
- Schneider National furnished initial computerized scheduling and electronic data interchange for 90 Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company shipping locations that were revamping their transportation operations in the late 1980s. The service included coordination of freight transit and associated documentation for all motor carriers 3M was using. 3M got the benefits of the latest information technology, and Schneider gained and still enjoys the position of nationwide core carrier for 3M.
These examples illustrate logistics alliances that are becoming commonplace business arrangements. Virtually unheard of a decade ago, such agreements are now spreading as a way of lowering distribution and storage operating costs. For many manufacturers and vendors, these ventures offer opportunities to dramatically improve the quality of customer service.
The principals in a typical agreement are a provider of customized logistics services and a producer of goods that jointly engineer and launch a system to speed goods to customers. But there are other forms too, like arrangements between two service providers and between two product marketers. (The insert, “Anatomy of Alliances,” discusses several formats.)
Anatomy of Alliances
Three characteristics distinguish logistics partnerships from run-of-the-mill cooperative business arrangements. First is a far more extensive link that makes the venture almost an extended organization with its own role, rules, values, and objectives. In the traditional purchasing situation, outsourcing is a make versus buy decision guided mostly by cost considerations. The logistics alliance is a special business compact in which the parties seek to benefit from the synergy of working together.
The second characteristic is concentration on a relationship continuum instead of a series of single transactions. A high degree of dependency develops, which stimulates further cooperation. Trust builds as the parties focus on customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Of the forms these ventures take, the most common involves a product marketer and a service provider like a warehousing company or a rail carrier. For example, look at the joint operation of Sears Business Systems and Itel Distribution Systems in Alsip, Illinois. Sears runs a reconfiguration room in Itel’s warehouse for modifying equipment to customers’ specifications. Itel supplies full-service logistics tying into Sears’s information network. Itel assembles basic orders, positioning equipment requiring modification in the reconfiguration room. Itel then assembles the complete order and performs the tasks necessary for timely delivery to the customer.
Some alliances combine the resources of service providers seeking to bolster their competitive positions. The Santa Fe Railway and J.B. Hunt Transport Services recently established intermodal freight transport whereby the former provides line-haul service and the latter, pickup and delivery. To stabilize the service—scheduled to run daily between Chicago and Los Angeles—the partners snared freight business from UPS and Ralston Purina. Some ventures between service companies may involve joint provision of service to a product marketer.
A common format for an alliance is a vertical alignment between two or more product marketers, usually marked by transfer of inventory ownership. (Some of these include a service supplier.) A simple instance is a distribution link between Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart. A more complicated version is a projected consortium of four companies in the women’s ready-to-wear apparel business: Du Pont, which makes the fiber; Milliken, which converts the fiber into fabric; Leslie Fay, which produces women’s garments; and Dillard Department Stores, which sells them. The arrangement makes the use of resources more efficient in the face of volatile fashion demand. The arrangement is geared to speed inventory replenishment and to reduce the time elapsing from fiber to retail rack.
Yet another type is horizontal alignment of product marketers selling to the same customer base. (It may include a service company as coordinator.) In the hospital supply business, such an alliance offers frequent joint delivery of member-company products—all facilitated by electronic data interchange. Formed in 1987 by Abbott Laboratories and the 3M Company, the group has expanded to include Standard Register (business forms), IBM (computer network services), Kimberly-Clark (nonwoven disposable products), and C.R. Bard (urological products). Abbott and 3M made their move initially to compete more effectively against rivals Baxter Healthcare and Johnson & Johnson Hospital Supply.
Outsourcing of transportation or warehousing requirements to a specialist is, of course, an everyday matter. What is unusual about the relationships described here is the innovative manner in which the parties commingle their operations to obtain mutual benefits. A prime example is Drug Transport, Inc., which has carved out a niche in less-than-truckload distribution in the pharmaceutical and office supply fields.
To permit wholesalers to offer daily delivery to retail customers at specified times, the Atlanta-based carrier has established an array of services and pricing. The rates are based on guaranteed delivery, at a fixed charge, to the retailer of whatever product quantity is required. The charge is based on average shipment weight at a rate negotiated in advance of each 30-day planning period; it remains the same throughout the period regardless of the quantity of freight shipped. The result is a dependable daily service at a fixed cost that the wholesalers and retailers know in advance. For Drug Transport, the arrangement means guaranteed revenue and stable operations for route planning and equipment scheduling.
Another feature of these arrangements is the cooperation they engender that replaces the sometimes adversarial stance separating buyers and sellers. Many of these relationships endure for five or more years, and many operate with informal understandings rather than formal contracts.
The level of involvement of specialists ranges from the routine services they perform as a matter of course to complete responsibility for the logistics requirements of a customer or a customer’s unit. Informal partnerships are common in the transport sector. For instance, CenTra, Inc.’s Central Transport Division provides time-phased delivery of components and parts to General Motors’s BOC Group plants in Lansing, Michigan. No specialized equipment is needed, and the arrangement is subject to annual review. At the other end of the spectrum is the long-term contract between NYK Line (Nippon Yusen Kaisha) and Pioneer Electronic, whereby NYK is handling all logistics aspects, from importing to customer distribution of mixed shipments of products, from a network of over one million square feet of warehouse space in the Los Angeles area.
Often these compacts call for the service provider to perform highly customized activity. Not long ago, Southern Bonded Warehouse agreed to combine U.S.-made bubble gum and Portuguese-made soccer balls into a point-of-sale promotion package. The Georgia company had to (1) take three pounds of gum from a bulk container, weigh it, and put it in a heat-sealed, tamperproof package; (2) inflate and inspect the soccer ball; (3) place the gum bag in the ball box; (4) place the ball on top of the box and stretch-wrap the package; and (5) put a certain number of units in a master carton and label and seal it.
In these alliances, the service provider usually assumes a certain amount of risk through an agreement calling for a penalty, such as an automatic reduction in revenues, when performance is poorer than specified. On the other hand, the agreements often include rewards for superior performance, such as a greater than expected percentage of on-time delivery. As indicated, the risk also may include a capital investment on the provider’s part.
Sometimes, however, the synergy obtained involves less risk for one of the partners. Owens-Corning Fiberglas, to boost productivity and gain competitive advantage, has taken on some tasks that traditionally are the carriers’ burden. Once a trucker delivers ready-to-use trailers to an Owens-Corning plant, its on-site responsibility ends. The manufacturer positions the trailers at docks and does the loading according to destination. Timing shipments for off-peak traffic periods helps to cut cost and boost driver productivity. The over-the-road movement direct from Owens-Corning plants to customer construction sites avoids costly pickup and origin terminal routing cost. Gaining lower operating costs and predictable equipment location, the carriers can reduce their freight rates. They share the savings with Owens-Corning. For the manufacturer, however, the great benefit is the competitive advantage it gains by supplying dependable job-site delivery within very tight time windows.
The benefits of these alliances are tangible enough and often big enough to attract quite a few players—many of them strangers to the logistics service industry. A very fast-growing segment of the field is the fulfillment or full-support company that specializes in turnkey services, from order processing to customer order delivery. By the mid-1990s, such value-added logistics business is expected to surpass $20 billion in volume. A few of these integrated providers pursuing full-service work are Roadway Logistics, Trammell Crow Distribution Corporation, KLS Logistics, CSL Logistics (part of CSX), USCO, Itel Distribution Systems, and Caterpillar Logistics Services.
Forces of Impetus
What accounts for this surge of enterprise in an activity that has often been a corporate stepchild? Among the multiplicity of forces creating a favorable environment for logistics alliances, four dominate.
1. The political-legal terrain of the 1980s stimulated the development of integrated service practices. Deregulation of transportation and communications, coupled with relaxed antitrust enforcement—intended to give productivity a charge—generated an atmosphere conducive to innovation. Washington is looking benignly at business alliances as long as they do not inhibit the prevailing level of competition in end-user markets. The National Cooperative Research Act of 1984, permitting some cooperation among competitors, is being construed to apply to logistics coalitions.
2. The explosion in information technology has made computerization cheap, and computers hold logistics alliances together. Schneider National, for example, has put satellite communications in all its over-the-road trucks so it can keep real-time track of vehicle location and on-board shipment data from headquarters in Wisconsin. Other late technological advances, like cellular phones, laser-based bar codes, and radio frequency transmissions, are in standard use at diverse haulers like Roadway, UPS, the Union Pacific Railroad, and Sea-Land.
3. Today’s emphasis on leaner organization makes managers more likely to turn to external specialists to solve problems or perform tasks outside the organization’s sphere of expertise. The objective of competing more effectively—through greater asset utilization, higher leverage, and faster responsiveness—is a prime stimulant toward logistics collaboration.
4. An escalating competitive environment forces the players to do all they can to become lowest cost competitors. Efficiency in logistics is particularly important for companies that are doing business abroad. Distribution costs, as a percentage of revenue, are greater for international companies than for their domestic counterparts. Complexity, long order lead times, unusual product-service requirements, and differing legal and cultural factors in foreign countries combine to create a much more challenging operating environment. Consequently, headquarters is willing to use qualified external support.
Strategic Vision
For companies successful with logistics partnerships, a common factor overriding all others is a recognition that this business activity is an important part of marketing strategy. Product, promotion, and price are the traditional competitive ingredients, while time and place competencies have taken a back seat. That relative neglect is changing. Those companies forming alliances are seeking to exploit their logistical competencies—not weaknesses. During the course of conducting research into the practices of more than 1,000 manufacturers, retailers, and wholesalers, it was clearly shown that some companies stand head and shoulders above their competitors in logistics performance, and they use this superiority to gain and keep customer loyalty.1
Superiority over the competition means placing a premium on being easy to do business with. All top managers “feel” they know what customers want. But fewer than one out of five companies establish rigid customer service standards, regularly measure performance to standards, or systematically digest feedback to improve operations.
Logistically speaking, being easy to do business with means that suppliers meet commitments and shipments arrive when and where promised. When problems crop up, progressive companies develop work-arounds that smoothly take care of the difficulty. Most noteworthy is the way that top performers use electronically conveyed information to gain competitive advantage. They specialize in eliminating surprises and in providing same-call responses to customer inquiries.
Strategic vision, however, calls for more than readiness to serve the customer; it calls for a willingness to offer extra, value-adding services. The object, of course, is to become a preferred supplier of key customers. Companies committed to strategic use of logistics usually outperform the competition in speed and consistency of order cycle. They normally have standards they intend customers to rely on and expect employees to adhere to. For Federal Express, the standard is delivery of all premium-service packages within 24 hours.
Often difficult to apply, reasonable but effective standards are also not always easy to set. A product marketer may feel comfortable promising the trade a 95% case-fill rate, supported by a five- to seven-day delivery that it expects to achieve 98% of the time. This goal, even if met, means that at least 5% of customers will always be disappointed in what they receive and at least 2% in when they receive it. Such statistically based performance, while once acceptable, does not fit a business strategy based on just-in-time or quick-response inventory replenishment.
A shrewd marketer will strive not only to consistently deliver complete orders to customers at the time and location requested but also to expand the scope and upgrade the level of service to keep a customer’s loyalty. At Atlanta-based Genuine Parts, the logistics staff is authorized to procure a critical out-of-stock part from a competitor rather than fail to deliver a key customer’s order. Leading companies recognize that while perfection in service may be unattainable, a culture based on an acceptable rate of failure will fail. By developing a high level of standard performance, they reduce the number of less-than-standard situations that have to be resolved. Moreover, high-quality logistics service compliance is almost invariably less expensive than a procedure based on an expected percentage of failure that demands frequent correction.
The drive to secure and hold customers reaches its peak in the leveraging of resources in the form of strategic alliances. Procter & Gamble, with its outstanding product supply network, can divert a customer’s shipment from a warehouse directly to a store on short notice. Drug wholesalers Bergen Brunswig, McKesson, and Alco Health Services offer their customers complete electronic inventory replenishment and merchandising control. Wal-Mart Stores has alliances with important suppliers of merchandise through which they manage their inventory levels and resupply in Wal-Mart warehouses.
In these alliances, specialization through a dedicated resource base generates economies of scale. For example, Dauphin Distribution Services Company, a warehouse specialist, can furnish consolidated inbound delivery for Shaw’s Supermarkets. In a single truck, Shaw’s outlet gets a mix of products from a combination of suppliers. Similarly, Continental Freezers of Illinois provides inbound staging and frozen food assortment service for Jewel Food Stores supermarkets. Normal distribution arrangements are more expensive and much less efficient.
The spread of risk is another attraction of these ventures; meshed operations between a product marketer and a service provider offer what amounts to risk insurance. Not only is the chance of error much less because each party is focusing on its specialty but also the partners share the consequences of failure if the compact includes performance guarantees. In the Hermosillo plant situation, Ford, American President Companies, and the four railroads share the risk.
The synergy stimulated by the joint effort can create a coalition of great strength. One reason for the synergy is the focus generated by a reduction in suppliers by the product marketer and a limit on the service provider’s number of customers (normal by-products of an alliance). Once focused, the two organizations often begin to seek growth opportunities for each other—to their mutual benefit. The fact that each views the logistics process from a different vantage point inspires creativity.
What They Bring to the Party
Because the core business of an enterprise is the focal point or target of the logistics partnership, the players must be economically and managerially strong. The typical alliance is a long-term arrangement that is expected to survive the fluctuations characteristic of most businesses. To support an alliance, the service provider and marketer must have the staying power to weather the downs as well as exploit the ups.
To justify using customized logistics services, the marketer needs an opportunity with a key customer or in a niche market for a rich return in market share improvement or competitive superiority. For Wal-Mart, the criterion is the volume of potential business at stake. Moreover, the potential supplier’s technological sophistication must be advanced enough to permit direct electronic connection with Wal-Mart’s satellite communications network. Otherwise, sharing the assortment of information required to make the alliance work is impractical.
As I have noted, information sharing is the glue that holds these ventures together. Synchronization of activities and progress toward shared goals require open disclosure, from operating details to strategic planning. Technology has kept pace to provide such capability. Some service providers have full-disclosure information systems in place.
Systems are available that permit real-time tracking of shipments at case-level or stockkeeping-unit detail throughout the distribution process. In some instances, as at Skyway Freight and Systems, a traffic manager wanting to know the projected arrival time can get a computer screen view of the in-transit status of a shipment. Estimated time of arrival (ETA) projections supply the information for evaluating the cost versus benefit of expediting a shipment to meet a required delivery time. Such in-transit control is a feature of a double-stack container service, operated by the Union Pacific Railroad and American President Companies, that links Pacific Rim garment manufacturers with the interior of North America. The service offers containerized delivery of goods on hangers that are size-and color-sequenced to particular retailers’ specifications before loading in Asia.
To perform effectively, each partner must operate on two levels. One level is performance of a specified role in a well-understood operating domain. The logistics process may take place across an enormous geographical playing field in what amounts to a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week, 52-week-a-year engagement. There is no room for ambiguity regarding who is responsible for doing what. Effectiveness depends on near error-free task completion and meshing of tasks.
The meshing of tasks is the second level of operation. Each party must see its assignment in terms of its contribution to the alliance and the way it adds value for customers. Otherwise, it may develop role myopia. The service provider and the marketer have to understand each other’s culture. The provider must appreciate the value system that drives the marketer’s decision-making process. The marketer must grasp how the provider approaches the marketer’s business. (Cultural absorption admittedly gets tricky when a service provider is simultaneously engaged in multiple alliances.)
A grasp of the whole distribution channel is necessary but sometimes difficult, especially for service providers. Moving damaged goods or product recalls back to the source is a headache for retailers and wholesalers. On their part, manufacturers do not want damaged goods for which they have already given credit to reappear on sale somewhere. The carrier, if it is not considering the entire channel, might treat its partners’ serious concerns too lightly.
Robin Transport’s understanding of GM’s parts delivery needs and of the total distribution channel led the Lansing, Michigan company to an innovation that benefited all parties. Robin designed trailers with fabric walls that made the trailers capable of being unloaded from the sides as well as from the rear. The trailers could load and unload in places where the standard trailer could not go, and they could be unloaded from three sides at once, near points of assembly. Robin loads the trailers in sequence for ease of components handling and delivers at certain specified times when GM is ready to take the shipments. To justify its investment in special handling equipment in the trailers and the dedication of part of its over-the-road fleet, Robin sought and got status as a preferred carrier at a premium rate. GM set up its production assembly to benefit from the different mode of materials handling. The manufacturer benefited from Robin’s understanding of the distribution channel by realizing productivity improvement through inventory reduction, JIT delivery, and more efficient materials handling.
The hallmark of these ventures is cooperation. An effective way to signal willingness to work together is to establish ground rules at the outset. These rules should include a procedure for conflict resolution so that any friction that arises is smoothed over before it harms the arrangement. Negotiation of roles before operations start, with clear ground rules for the parties, helps perpetuate alliance longevity.
Even so, partnerships often evolve or are modified for good reasons, especially changing business conditions. Signal Freight’s operation that supports the Sears-Whirlpool alliance has shifted significantly over the years to accommodate the customers. Sears’s recent decision to stock a variety of national-brand appliances (its “Brand Central” promotion) has meant one more adjustment for this Leaseway Transportation Division.
A provision allowing for changed circ*mstances, negotiated before startup, is especially important for the service provider, since in a typical logistics alliance the marketing organization holds the power. Carriers and other service providers have usually been at the mercy of product marketers because transportation can always be purchased on a trip-by-trip basis and warehouse agreements can be limited to 30-day commitments. Provision for an exit from the agreement is a sensitive matter, but in fairness to the service provider it should be negotiated. (Where special-purpose equipment or facilities are involved, it is the practice to incorporate buy-sell agreements in the alliance documents.)
Exel Logistics, a subsidiary of the U.K.-based conglomerate NFC, has rules regarding this issue. It requires that all contracts signed by Exel affiliates include a framework outlining the dissolution procedure and an agenda of exit negotiation items. Although several of these contracts have operating horizons of a decade or more, Exel management is convinced that such a framework is essential to establish a sound platform for the alliance up front and that, in fact, spelling everything out strengthens the relationship.
Why Alliances Fail
While simulation of alternatives is sometimes possible, many operations represent a leap of faith; the parties are obliged to forge ahead, full of hope. When Procter & Gamble decided to consolidate its West Coast distribution facilities into one giant 400,000-plus square-foot facility in Sacramento, the company obviously could not test the idea. Without the benefit of complete information, P&G and its warehouse partner hammered out agreements concerning goals, expected benefits, and contingent responsibilities. The warehouse installation proceeded without major problems.
Such a plunge into the unknown complicates the all-important business of establishing relationships and developing a clear vision of mutual expectations. In such situations, the managers involved often are simply incapable of overcoming the limits of their different cultures. Given people’s natural resistance to change, it is reasonable to expect clashes of culture and styles when employees of two or more companies commence working together toward common objectives. Often they are working side by side more or less permanently.
Developing the trust that makes the alliance work requires an open door and an open mind. This attitude is not easy for managers schooled in an adversarial tradition. For example, the belief that carriers and warehouse-based service companies promote the alliance concept as a subterfuge for selling the same old service is widespread among shipper executives. (One category of service providers actually tries to exploit this suspicion. The entry strategy of Global Logistics Venture, a joint venture of AMR and CSX, calls for provision of information technology to coordinate the purchase of services from a number of specialists, in contrast to actual provision of the services.)
In the traditional kind of negotiation of a service agreement, the tone is adversarial and the parties rely on a host of competitive checks and balances to ensure buyers that they are getting a good deal. In an alliance, trust has to substitute for many of the perceived benefits of competitive bidding. The partners’ reluctance to share ideas can abort an agreement, once entered into, if they also have to share information they consider to be confidential.
Then how do you build trust in situations where no track record exists? One way to resolve this dilemma is through a procedure used by Union Pacific Logistics for building trust progressively during the evaluation and negotiation of an alliance. The instrument is a facilitator acceptable to all the parties and connected with none of them. This person tries to put the negotiations on an objective basis by acting as the neutral focal point during the bargaining.
As the alliance matures, trust level and operational success become inseparable. Failure to develop trust during the early stages spells trouble. One supplier of multiple logistics services recently ended negotiations with a consortium of shippers because the supplier decided that the group was not truly seeking a total system solution for their joint requirements. Early on, the supplier became convinced that the consortium was really trying to leverage its purchasing power to get a low price from the supplier, and so trust never developed.
As in this case, the reality is that one of the parties usually has more at stake than the others. There is often an imbalance of power as well. The result: uneven commitment to the welfare of the arrangement.
Sometimes an alliance is forged at high levels of the companies involved, but little attention is paid to getting the lower echelons, which will be charged to make it work, to sign on. The middle managers who play a key role in the operation may see the prospects as jeopardizing their careers, particularly if their areas of expertise become the focus of outsourcing. Moreover, if they remain unacquainted with the goals of the program, they may perceive the objective as simply to cut costs. Why then, they say, throw out the old, proven techniques? Why do we need all these people from the other company around?
But business cannot be operations as usual under the umbrella of a logistics alliance. At one retailer, a warehouse traditionally granted delivery appointments no earlier than 24 hours in advance, and then on a first-come, first-unloaded basis. The practice frustrated a fully integrated, quick-response inventory replenishment system arranged with a carrier. Dedicated equipment loaded with time-sensitive merchandise was left undelivered at the warehouse.
In traditional operations, it is unnecessary to separate ownership from control. But in an alliance, the separation has to be part of daily practice because ownership spreads across the joint process and at all the levels concerned. Control is recognized in a framework of interorganizational operating principles expressing what the alliance is supposed to do and how it will get done. Included are measures to be taken by each party when things go wrong, as they inevitably will.
The operating framework will falter if it omits mutually accepted yardsticks for gauging performance and progress. Conflict will arise if all the parties do not fully understand the score.
The appropriate accounting for total costs and asset-driven activity is not easy to establish when two or more organizations are involved. From a service supplier’s viewpoint, the key to accurate measurement may be an understanding of the client’s critical business success factors. For example, price margins based on average cost have little, if any, usefulness in specialized service situations. In an alliance, selling margins may be much lower but utilization of assets much higher. Bergen Brunswig recently reported a sharp improvement in pretax income despite big gross margin reductions. This improvement comes from a disciplined approach to distribution and an improved return on net assets produced by alliances with druggists.
For a product marketer, the major benefit of an alliance could be as basic as improved reliability. The partners must see to it that measurement of this factor gets translated into numbers that can be put on paper and compared with some prior period. The reliability improvement may start with the fact that the same truck drivers are visiting key customers continually and thus forming relationships with them. Eventually this intangible gets translated into something more tangible and thus measurable.
Making a Partnership Work
Logistics alliances are making U.S. industry more efficient and thus more competitive. Logistics costs in 1990 are expected to exceed $525 billion, or about 10.5% of GNP. In 1981, the proportion was 15.4%. In terms of comparative assets to GNP, the distribution system is operating this year on $100 billion less average inventory than it did in 1981. Some of these improvements can be attributed to logistics partnerships.
While cost reductions are, of course, very desirable, they are not an end in themselves. The main rationale for orchestrating an alliance is to increase competitive advantage. As one executive put it, “For us, the reason for this venture is market impact. Cost reduction is important but secondary.”
To make a partnership work, experience provides these guidelines:
- View the arrangement as the implementation of a strategic plan. Encourage the participants involved to consider their roles in terms of a value-added process.
- Seek an arrangement that achieves scale-economy benefits while spreading risk.
- Recognizing that the benefits can be gained only through a long-term relationship in which the parties are interdependent, make sure that the information necessary to function well is shared between them.
- Build trust between the organizations by setting unambiguous goals, establishing clear roles, laying down firm rules, and measuring performance rigorously.
- Start the venture on a realistic course by acknowledging that eventually the alliance may have to be terminated.
1. The research is reported in Donald J. Bowersox et al., Leading Edge Logistics—Competitive Positioning for the 1990s (Oak Brook, Ill. Council of Logistics Management, 1989).
A version of this article appeared in the July–August 1990 issue of Harvard Business Review.
