Digitalizing Logistics – IT and Automation

This article sets out to explain the basics, the tools and the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution in corporate planning and distribution operations.

The authors point out that this industrial strategy, the apotheosis of the " Lean, as it were, relies on autonomous equipment in terms of :

• configuration ;

• self-diagnosis ;

• optimization.

Interconnecting this equipment via intelligent networks covering the entire supply chain will lead to flexible manufacturing capabilities, adapting to variations in material quality, final consumer demand, transport contingencies and other parameters and disruptions.

This article presents the remarkable developments and opportunities offered by information technology to logistics. Logistics is all about knowing and serving your customers' demand for materials and services –and those of your operations, in order to serve those same customers. Complex and varied in its functions, logistics will be one of the last corporate functions to benefit from the new capabilities of information technology: more efficient and constantly less costly.

As a result, business processes have evolved from digitization (the digitalization of tools that were previously paper-based), to digitization (the use of integrated information systems to carry out processing). The era of digitization of logistics is upon us, with a drastic transformation of processes made possible by information technology.

The basic data processing technologies that make this revolution possible are described in §1. 1 . They show that the dynamics are ever more powerful, at ever lower prices. We can even conclude that the impossibilities in terms of computing power no longer exist, or will no longer exist in the near future. This information processing power is used for a wide range of applications – commercial transaction processing and operations planning, discussed in greater detail in §1.