Hello all,
this may sound like a very silly question but I desperately need help.
I am going to write a dissertation about one company’s need for interdepartmental communication. However I can’t work out what my most important, suggested, department would be called.
It is purely about arranging the transportation from a warehouse to the end user. The warehouse and freight company is a 3PL provider and so it is mostly to make sure the right customer gets a product that is high in demand.
From the beginning I assumed this would be logistics but reading some Operations definitions I’m not too sure anymore.
Thanks for any help or thoughts you can provide!
Operations deals with general business process, day-to-day operations, including everything from products to customer service.
Logistics is the framework for the management of material, service, information and capital flows, but in real-world use we primarily think of materials and services (anything that ‘physically moves’).
These definitions are vague, and you’ll see all sorts of contradicting ones on the web. But you get the general idea.
If you are arranging the transportation from the warehouse to the customer, I’d probably call that operations. My reason is because that sounds like a relatively distinct, specific, and single part of the business process that is being addressed. If you said that the company was dealing with inventory coming in from 400 suppliers to 3 warehouses in 2 countries, then products were shipped to customers in 35 countries using 6 carriers - that’s more of a traditional logistics challenge.
But, I don’t think these terms are as absolute as some people claim 
You could use both terms, because the operational aspect of shipping is actually a small logistics effort.