Physical Material Flow
The development of e-business will and has already set increased quality requirements on logistics services and on the logistics
infrastructure as a whole. Customers are demanding products and deliveries customized to their specific needs and flexible
outsourcing of supply chain operations is a necessity in volatile business environments (Kärkkäinen & Holmström, 2001). It will be
important to be able to provide a different level of service to different customer segments or to individual clients at home. These
services must create added value for the clients and at the same time optimize the overall cost structure of the supply network. Table
III summarizes the key research and development topics and their importance according to the workshop. The numbers 0-5 describe
how many of the groups in the workshop identified the topic as “very important”.
As a conclusion, R&D topics related to physical material flow should be divided into two major themes: technology related
R&D to support the development of new logistics services to enable the necessary changes in the value chains and analysis of
potential changes in the national logistics infrastructure to support e-business development