Modern manufacturing management methods cause a complete change, both in the technical operation process and in the information system that regulates it. The division between production functions is reconsidered, and new performance criteria are developed, to allow a better coordination along the whole manufacturing process, a closer link between market and production, a better global efficiency. Logistics methods appear as a main tool in this evolution, so as to lower the inventory level, accelerate the rotation of capital, and strengthen flexibility and reliability to achieve just-in-time production. The freight transport is directly involved in these changes: its implication in production management is stronger, while its own methods and structures are made more cohe¬rent with those of manufacturing industry.
This article after defining the part and the field of physical distribution, analyses the strategy that manufacturers, distributors and transporters try to built around this step. The strategy described here is shown as being able to upset in the area of the transportation of goods.
The offer as concerns land transport on an international level is characterized by structural as well as functional deficiencies. The realization of a unique European market within the context of increasing deregulation obliges transportation firms to position themselves as industrialists of circulation.Improved efficiency in transportation, bringing greater added value, is consequent upon new strategies and productive combinations based upon the organization of net works. linking the international to the national, resulting in the supply of system-products made up of an ensemble of polyvalent characteristics, being closely integrated within the cycle of supply-production-delivery and transforming the function of conveying into a genuine process of delivery.
Transport is not used in the same way by all industrial sectors. This is what the article shows synthetically after research carried out in agri-food and hosiery industrial areas. It appears that the logistical maturity of firms accounts for a new organizational pattern, the network, coming into being.
A survey of 1740 shippers, industrialists and merchants, was conducted by INRETS in 1988. New methodological devices led to a breakthrough in the knowledge of commodity transportation:- a systematic coverage of all agents involved in the transport led to a full description of the transport chain;- rather than tons and ton-kilometers, the basic unit is the shipment;- systematic questions on the consigner and consignee economic characteristics bring a better understanding of the role of transportation in the economic process.Beyond the 1740 shippers, specific questions were asked to more than 5 000 carriers or transport agents.The second part of the paper presents some interesting results, which could not have been obtained through the currently available statistical data. They include a typology of transport chains, a description of how the various carriers and agents are connected, an analysis of what for, and to what extent computers are used in transportation.