If in the beginning the Internet was used to publish electronic brochures at a low cost, today it has become much more important. The Internet is a valuable employee for the companies that know how to use it.
The success of a Retail&B2B Logistics project rests on the development of applications that can automate human labor as much as possible. This type of project needs systems that can easily communicate with the similar systems of the suppliers, transport companies or distributors. These systems have to give easy access to information to the final clients, they have to generate reports for the decision makers, and allow for a detailed inventory.
Wal-Mart has two technological strong points that cause it to dominate the competition:
1. Each of the millions of products, sold daily in more than 4000 supermarkets, has a unique identity.
2. Every time a client buys a product, the supplier gets a message from thousands of miles away, saying that a similar product needs to be delivered at a specific distribution center in a specific day.
This is what online logistics means.
TreeWorks has developed this type of systems (at a smaller scale of course): the E-Logistics Application Intrepid Business Solutions and the E-Logistics System SportsFanfare). These systems represent an interface between the online distribution of the products, the suppliers' inventories and the transportation through several carriers.