The history of Japanese logistics is not long, but its development speed is very fast. Nowadays, with advanced logistics technology and management methods, it has well controlled the cost and become an advanced country in the world logistics field.
Compared with the United States, the Japanese logistics industry started late, but it is still ahead of China. Through decades of development, Japan's logistics industry has made great progress, and many technologies and indicators for measuring the logistics industry are very eye-catching.
Paying attention to costs is something that Japanese companies are doing for decades. In this issue, let us look at the specific level of logistics costs in Japan. What effective reforms have Japanese companies made to reduce logistics costs?
First, the logistics cost ratio is low
In the international arena, the ratio of the total cost of social logistics to GDP is usually used to measure the development level of a country's logistics, and the logistics development level of the industry is measured by the proportion of enterprise logistics costs to product sales.
In 2013, the ratio of total social logistics costs to GDP in China was 18%, which was basically the same as the previous year. According to the analysis report of the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing, this ratio is higher than Japan by 9.5 percentage points, which is higher than the global average by about 6.5 percentage points. Compared with logistics developed countries like Japan, China's logistics cost ratio is obviously higher.
From the data of the Japanese logistics industry, from 1995 to 2003, the logistics logistics cost of the entire logistics industry in Japan accounted for nearly one percentage point of product sales, and has remained at around 5% since 2003. Stable level. In the United States, the proportion of corporate logistics costs to product sales in 2012 was 7.87%. In 2013, the proportion of corporate logistics costs to product sales was 8.41%, higher than Japan and showing an upward trend.
In terms of manufacturing industry, in 2013, the logistics cost of industries such as Japanese ceramics, earth and stone, glass and cement accounted for the highest proportion of product sales, which was 8.69%; the second place was the food industry that needed to be transported through cold chain. The proportion of the food industry, which can be transported at room temperature, is 8.57%.
Further analysis of the specific cost structure, taking truck transportation as an example, from the survey data of the Japan Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism and the All-Japan Truck Association in 2011, the proportion of transportation labor costs is as high as 45.9%, considering the reasons for this data formation. First, Japan's labor costs are generally higher; second, non-manual costs have been compressed as much as possible.
Second, upgrade from automation and information systems
In different eras, each industry will have different presentations and face different problems, which will also promote solutions in the corresponding context.
In Japan in the 1860s, the surge in production and sales of companies led to a surge in material flows. Not only that, inflation has led to rising prices and rising labor costs.
In order to alleviate these two major problems, the Japanese logistics industry adopted this time to increase the mechanization, improve logistics processing capacity, and reduce labor. It is at this time that the three-dimensional automated warehouse appears to realize the rational use of the high-rise space of the warehouse and realize the automatic access to the goods.
Today, the three-dimensional warehouse has become an independent discipline and has grown rapidly in Japan. Since the end of the 1880s, Japan's three-dimensional warehouse has been used in the manufacturing, agricultural, warehousing, wholesale and retail, banking and insurance industries, and the automation of logistics has been widely used. At present, Japan has become the most widely used country in the world for automated warehouses.
In addition to automation equipment, the Japanese logistics industry began to improve efficiency through information systems in the 1970s.
After the first oil crisis, the era of rapid economic growth in Japan ended, the flow of goods began to stabilize, and the demand for improving logistics processing capacity was relatively weak. Under such an era, the Japanese logistics industry began to focus on improving the efficiency of logistics.
Prior to this, the information system of the Japanese logistics industry has not yet been popularized, and the processing efficiency by the traditional method is poor. For example, the sales department in Japan generally submits monthly information such as warehousing, delivery, and inventory to the head office at the end of the month. The head office cannot quickly modify the production plan or make other adjustments based on the information of the sales outlets in real time.
From the late 1970s, the logistics information network began to develop rapidly, integrating various outlets, as well as production, sales and other related departments in a system, realizing real-time online logistics information processing and interaction, greatly improving efficiency.
Importing information systems, in the short term, increases the cost of import and maintenance, but in the long run, it saves communication costs and time costs, and avoids the costs caused by information asymmetry. With the development of the economy, the information system of the Japanese logistics industry has become more and more perfect.
Third, the three major measures to reduce costs
Although Japan's logistics industry is already at the leading level, they are still concentrating on reducing costs.
According to a survey conducted by 182 companies in Japan in the 2013 Japan Logistics Cost Survey Report released by the Japan Association of Logistics Systems, in 2013, the top three methods for reducing logistics costs adopted by Japanese companies were: Loading rates, reducing inventory and re-planning logistics locations.
In fact, this is the way that Japanese companies have continued to use in recent years to reduce logistics costs.
In the logistics industry, loading rates are a way to assess operational efficiency. From the perspective of logistics costs, transportation costs account for about 60%, and small-volume, multi-frequency transportation will lead to inefficiency. By increasing the loading rate, you can reduce the number of vehicles used, such as vehicles, and thus reduce transportation costs, which is the source of their efforts to increase the loading rate.
The reason why the logistics loading rate is low is largely due to the contradiction between weight and volume. For example, when the goods are already full, but the weight is less than half the weight, and the logistics company generally charges the freight by weight, it will cause waste of the tonnage resources of the vehicle, require more vehicles to transport, and increase the transportation cost.
Therefore, how to properly mix goods for transportation is very important to reduce logistics costs. Before carrying out the cargo matching, detailed analysis of the relevant data of the route, delivery time, weight and volume, packaging, logistics network, loading method and other factors of each delivery address is beneficial to rationalize the transportation and improve the loading rate.
It seems simple but the actual operation is more complicated, and because the domestic demand is placed first in Japan and is subject to the JIT production method, the difficulty of increasing the loading rate cannot be ignored. It can be seen that the Japanese logistics industry has entered a period of intensive cultivation.
In addition to breaking through in the loading rate, Japanese companies began to cut inventories.
The reduction in the number of products in the library helps to reduce the cost of deposits and management, improve the flow of funds, and at the same time make the storage operation more convenient, but the inventory can not be reduced as desired, and it will take the initiative to launch the whole body, and need to consider various problems. For example, whether the goods placed in the logistics center are consistent with the hot goods.
In addition, due to the high degree of internationalization of Japanese companies, many companies have placed production bases overseas and sold products abroad. In this context, once the inventory is insufficient,
replenishment is required, and more transportation costs and time costs will be faced. At present, from the perspective of the overall supply chain to predict the need to accurately predict inventory, rationalization of inventory settings, is considered the core of inventory management. At present, it is more common to reduce inventory methods such as cleaning up dead stocks, sorting categories, intensive inventory bases, shortening production preparation time, and improving sales forecasting accuracy.
replenishment is required, and more transportation costs and time costs will be faced. At present, from the perspective of the overall supply chain to predict the need to accurately predict inventory, rationalization of inventory settings, is considered the core of inventory management. At present, it is more common to reduce inventory methods such as cleaning up dead stocks, sorting categories, intensive inventory bases, shortening production preparation time, and improving sales forecasting accuracy.
At the same time, due to the aging of Japan and the problem of population reduction, logistics needs to be reduced. Japanese companies re-planned their logistics sites, integrated logistics sites, and reduced the number of logistics sites. Even many Japanese companies have begun to adopt the factory direct delivery method.