Reply to the students response to the question in 150 words and provide 1 referencequestion 

• What is logistics called in your company? Who is the senior logistics leader in your company?  What’s their title?   Who’s their boss?  Briefly discuss your thoughts on this organizational structure in regards to 1) cost efficiency and 2) service effectiveness.

students response 

This is alway a hard question for me because at my company we call various aspects different names than the traditional name. For instance we don’t have a Human Resources (HR) group. We call them P&C, which stands for People and Culture. Our company likes to push the happy workplace, good life balance, laid-back culture feeling, so logistics is certainly a thing but I’m not sure what we call them. I have met people that say they work in supply chain management in various respects, and since I know a couple of those people I’ll just assume they are a part of the overall “logistics” group.

The senior leader for this group is named Bob. He manages the supply and demand managers. These are the people that come reach out to the business areas to find out what we need, and then communicate this need to the supply chain folks and the buyers who then go and purchase these things and get good deals with other suppliers. Bob’s boss is the ultimate head of operations, Kevin. I have heard some fairly unfortunately poor things about the demand management side of the house, but they have recently made a change to the organizational structure here so hopefully that gets better soon. They used to have a team that did not have a lot of direction and guidance, but now they have a more organized and experienced leadership team who is helping them develop good processes.

I think there are at least two versions of service effectiveness. There is internal service effectiveness and external. We have a logistics team that is serving the business to help meet their goals, and then there is the aspect of serving the actual customers and delivering them a high quality product in a timely manner. I think we could use improvement on both ends, but our internal service effectiveness is getting much better and it starts with really good communication between the business and operations. We need to have better and more dedicated liaisons between the two, and thankfully I think we’re getting there. They are starting the understand the way that some of our businesses actually operate and they are changing the way they ask questions and collect information due to that.