JOSSOM Outils de lecture

No one can deny the fact that logistics has its origins in the military art. It has continued to develop over the centuries, ending up in the last century in companies. Much has been said on Logistics over the last century, due to the proliferation of academic research on this topic. Moreover, Marketing researchers were the first academicians to be interested in logistics, because of the close relationship between these two disciplines. The origins of Supply Chain Management go back to the 1980s. Overtime, Supply Chain Management became an independent discipline and a separate function inside companies, but its influence did not materialize until the 1990s, with the explosion of definitions, which aimed to clarify this concept, and especially to distinguish it from Logistics.

There is an abundant literature on Logistics and Supply Chain Management, but confusion remains in the literature.  Is Supply Chain Management the synonym of Logistics? Or are the two concepts quite different? There is a great deal of ambiguity in the literature, and few authors have succeeded in one way or another in removing the veil from these two concepts. To answer these questions, we will analyze the evolution of logistics and Supply Chain Management and, then, make relevant comparisons.