The Evolution of Inbound Logistics

From yesterday’s legacies to tomorrow’s visionaries, the theory and practice of inbound logistics is timeless.

For this magazine and its loyal readership—both veterans and newcomers—inbound logistics is a 27-year story about a radical vision that continues to define a revolutionary paradigm shift. But its history, and consequently ours, runs much deeper.

Inbound logistics, in principle and in print, an anomaly. It both defies and embraces time; it assumes many forms and variations but is defined by a common demand-driven trait; it is very much an agent of change, yet equally derivative of change itself.

In an effort to give shape to this legacy and our mission, we dedicate this year’s Logistics Planner issue to the evolution of inbound logistics.


We begin our narrative with a retrospective of Ford Motor Company’s just-in-time assembly line and the Toyota Production System. Revisiting Henry Ford’s and Taiichi Ohno’s seminal memoirs, Today and Tomorrow and the Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production, presents two important markers for tracking the development of demand-driven logistics from yesterday to today.

Within this developing sequence, we present an inbound story of adaptation and survival. Beginning with the origins of Inbound Traffic Guide in 1981, the theory and practice of inbound logistics took root in the very pages of this magazine.

From our archives we rediscover case histories that transcend time and trace the progression of demand-driven logistics from cellular acceptance to mass replication.

From this phase, we jump to the present, with a look at how H.J. Heinz Company and Toyota Industrial Equipment Manufacturing are engineering technology and process to leverage inbound transportation processes and drive visibility and efficiency within their supply chains.

Finally, we shift our scope from the present to the future and consider how two forward-thinking companies—American Greetings and Panasonic—continue to adapt their go-to-market strategies through the lens of inbound transportation and demand-driven programs.

Individually these stories reveal the unique economic drivers, global trends, and consumer dynamics that continue to shape the evolution of inbound logistics.

Collectively, they present a meta-narrative of leadership and vision that challenges the status quo, permeates physical and cultural silos, and engineers a path for innovation and transformation across the supply chain.

Invariably the future of supply chain management, and specifically inbound logistics, owes a great debt to the past—and this evolution still holds much to glean.

As Henry Ford sagely observes in Today and Tomorrow, “It is one of the oddities of business that a man will cite what he has done in the past as proof of what he can do in the future. The past is only something to learn from.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *