The Need for Organisational Resilience Chapter-6

cohesion (as well as potential lack of military intelligence and inept central co-ordination)

highlights what logistical incohesion the Allies had to deal with:

As if things could not get any worse [for the French], most of the supply elements with

the fuel trucks and the repair units were in the south, whereas the French tanks were cut

off from the farther north. A number of Char B battle tanks were standing on the railroad

flatcars, almost without gas, in the unloading stations, when they were surprised by

Reinhardt’s panzer. (Frieser 2005, 263)

Translation and Explanation: JIT versus JIC

The role of logistics serves a different purpose in war than it does in most commercial

organisations. In war,

Logistics governs the battlefield, not only at the lowest levels of strategy, where it

determines whether or not soldiers receive food and bullets, but at the highest, where it

determines what armies can do. [Kane, p. 32]

Hence, logistics enables movement of an army and its battle effectiveness; how and

when to move resources to the places of military conflict. In business, it is less a question of

how armies can be moved, but of how customers’ needs and wants can be served. In this

regard,

Business logistics is the part of supply chain management that plans, implements, and

controls the efficient, effective forward and reverse flow and storage of goods, services,

and related information between the point of origin and the point of consumption in order

to meet customers’ requirements. (Adapted from Council of Supply Chain Management

Professionals 2017)

Germany as well as the Allies in WWII applied a principal logistical philosophy that is

known in management speak as Just-in-Case (JIC) logistics, although the Germans

mastered JIC whereas the French suffered significant delays in making supplies available to

front-line troops. JIC entails maintaining large inventories of supplies, parts and resources, to

buffer uncertainties in the supply-chain. Stocks are reordered when these meet a minimum

level.

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