Logistics as a profit centre and her relationship with Supply chai,Warehouse and procurement

Today we discuss on logistics.Logistics has its origins in the military.However it has found use in civilian life and indeed in manufacturing and other forms of businesses setup.Logistics in simple language  is  the total form of processes,systems and goods from the source to the point of ultimate consumption.Logistics is a component in a wider supply chain process.To simplify your understanding look at this example.
Consider a factory located at Town K whose raw materials comes from Town S located 600kilometers away.This factory finished goods are sold in Town D.All processes involved in moving raw materials to production site,and again movement of finished products from the factory to customers in Town D forms logistics for this factory.In some small organizations some procurement activities may be under logistics,while in large organizations logistics concentrate with actual movements of both raw materials and finished goods and work in tandem with procurement.
Often confusion exist between these terms materials management,Procurement,Logistics and physical distribution.In my years of experience i discovered that materials management deals with raw materials and work in progress;Physical distribution deals with finished goods;Procurement deals with acquisition of materials,services etc related to company operations;Logistics deals with actual movement of goods from one point to another be it finished goods or raw materials.Warehousing deals mainly with receipt,storage and issuing of Goods.Warehousing falls in either way-if it stores finished goods then falls under physical distribution;However if it deals with raw materials only then shall be under materials management.Supply chain as the word depicts are all those processes and systems in procurement,logistics,warehousing etc which make up a total range of activities and movement from raw materials to ultimate consumer.In a nutshell warehousing,procurement ,logistics are subset in supply chain.From the above you should be able to notice that logistics plays an important role in most organizations.Processes,systems and people in logistics department in an organizations can generate profit for organization or losses depending on those parameters.In future we shall also discuss on each of those parameters.It may interest you also to note that in most efficient organizations logistics has two dimensions-Forward logistics and reverse logistics.We shall discuss further on those terms in our future posts.
Later also in these posts we shall discuss on the challenges by logistics teams and collaborations with others department in large organizations.