The LogEC project reflects previous and ongoing research within the field of Logistics and Electronic Commerce (LogEC) at the mcm institute of the University of St. Gallen.
It analysed the impact of the extensive use of electronic media on the logistics sector. The project was initiated by Daimler Benz AG Research & Development Department and the IT-Department of DANZAS Management Ltd. in 1997. It is in its third period and is now funded by the Danzas Foundation and carried out by the mcm institute, the institute for technology management and the Danzas Management AG, sending two representatives to complete the project team.
In the first period, the LogEC project examined the emergent business opportunities for a current logistics service provider (LSP), on a general level. Two concepts have been developed and evaluated by means of expert interviews and an expert workshop: The Cooperative Model describes the spontaneous creation of NetEnterprises in the field of logistics. The intermediary should co-ordinate this Virtual Enterprise and theoretically create a new enterprise for every new demand. The intermediary represents the composed enterprise towards the customer being the only institution which he is dealing with. Skeleton agreements are concluded with enough freedom for negotiations and flexible co-ordination. The Decentralised Concept being the second concept can be seen as an Electronic Market (EM) for logistic services. The compelling condition for such a Market is the development of a demand for logistic services at one segment of the Value Chain. This concept focuses only on this particular demand .
Based on those general findings and concepts, LogEC II concretised those concepts leading to the definition of three scenarios describing the possible future roles of a current logistics service provider, the business community and the underlying electronic platform implementing that scenario as well as development paths guiding the migration of an LSPs current business to its future business activities. The first scenario, "Electronic Market for Transport" envisions a current LSP as an intermediary on an electronic market for transportation services. The second scenario "Industry Solutions" took a closer look at production companies and examined which services and tasks could be outsourced to a third party, particularly an LSP. Finally, the third scenario "Integrated Logistics Solutions" looked at the whole supply chain, resp. the net constituted by different - intersecting - supply chains, and envisioned how they could be supported and optimised by electronic means. For the description and the development of those scenarios, we applied the media model and the media reference model, two concepts, developed by Prof. Beat Schmid of the mcm institute. Here media are envisioned as platforms supporting the communication, and thus value resp. knowledge creation of a community (of agents), here the logistics community (agents being interested resp. offering logistics services.)
Finally LogEC III refines especially scenario II and III and again considers the whole supply chains. Here, the idea is, that a company should merely concentrate on its core competency, i.e. the marketing and production of goods, whereas all other services are being outsourced. Thus, the objective of the project is to define the service landscape arising from employing integrated, open information platform resp. business media, and to evaluate the different services w.r.t. technical and economic feasibility, potentials and threads as well as their strategic implications. This will lead to the development of recommendations to help an LSP to position himself in such a landscape. Those recommendations can then also be used to define the future strategic orientation.
