70% of Companies Don't Have a Written Logistics Strategy. That's an Opportunity, Not a Problem

In this episode of Rozmowy Logistyków, Piotr Skobało and Adam Sobolewski discuss what a logistics strategy actually is and why as many as 70% of companies don't have one. They explain where to start building a logistics strategy and why it's not just an operational topic, but a business one.

STARTING POINT: WHAT WE SELL, NOT HOW WE TRANSPORT IT

The first part of building a logistics strategy has nothing to do with logistics — it's about what the company wants to sell, where, and in what volumes, ideally broken down by quarter or month (accounting for seasonality). Without this data, logistics operates in the dark and has to hedge on cost — if sales declares an uncertain volume, the warehouse and fleet get built with a safety margin, which means higher costs than a precise forecast would require. Building such a strategy for real, at a large retailer, took around 9 months, the first half of which was meetings with the board and the owner about which market developments and segments (retail chains, brick-and-mortar, e-commerce) the company believes in.

"ROAD TO MARKET": SPEED AS A STRATEGIC DECISION, NOT AN OPERATIONAL ONE

Choosing the customer service model — delivery in minutes (quick commerce), in 24 hours, or in a week — defines the entire distribution network structure, and this decision can't be undone operationally later. Transit time from a distant warehouse can't be "skipped" with a promise of faster delivery — companies that didn't think this through at the start of their strategy later ran into physical limits that couldn't be fixed without rebuilding the network. The classic trade-off: price, quality, speed — pick two of three.

DOCUMENT FORMAT: VISUALS FOR THE BOARDROOM, TEXT FOR IMPLEMENTATION

PowerPoint works well for summarizing strategy for the board (one slide with a warehouse map and flow arrows lands harder than a page of text), but actual implementation needs a detailed written document — specific enough to give the delivery team a clear reference point, so they don't have to invent everything from scratch, while still leaving room for their own operational decisions.

SCENARIOS, NOT FORECASTS CARVED IN STONE

Instead of forcing sales into one rigid number ("we'll sell exactly 123 units"), a strategy should include variants (e.g. +20%/-20%, +50%/-50% of volume) with clearly defined triggers for specific investment decisions — for example, if sales in a given market cross threshold X, we start building a new logistics center, which needs 6-12 months to deliver anyway. The goal isn't to hold sales accountable to a years-old forecast's accuracy, but to enable decisions ahead of time, before the organization starts choking under unplanned growth.

DOCUMENT ELEMENTS: NETWORK, FUNDING, IT

Beyond service goals, a strategy should include a logistics network organization model (warehouse and distribution center locations, in-house resources vs. transport outsourcing), an infrastructure funding model, and a plan for IT systems architecture development (when the current system will stop being enough for the scale of operations and a new one will need to be deployed). None of these elements function in logistics today without IT support.

THE DOCUMENT HAS TO LIVE, NOT SIT IN A DRAWER

Most of the effort goes into the first version of the strategy — subsequent updates (recommended once a year, as strategic workshops) require much less effort, because each participant only updates their own piece (the finance person the funding model, the logistics person the processes and technology). A common organizational mistake: sales is held accountable for targets in front of the board, but no one checks whether the operational consequences of those results (opening a warehouse, deploying a system) actually happen on the planned timeline — a logistics strategy can't be revised in isolation from the rest of the organization, only cyclically, together with it.

EXTERNAL SUPPORT FOR THE FIRST ATTEMPT

Building a logistics strategy is an interdisciplinary process, and rarely does anyone in the organization have the competence to run it alone the first time. An external consultant brings experience from running this process repeatedly in other organizations, plus current market knowledge of available solutions and partners — and after going through the process once, that competence usually stays in the organization, making future, independent updates easier. The argument "we didn't sell because logistics didn't deliver" stops holding up in organizations with a real strategy — because failing to prepare capacity ahead of time is a planning mistake, not an operational one.