Summary and lesson learned in Logistic Summer 2022

I would like to use my last blog post to share a summary and my personal lesson learned from my summer semester at UPV in Logistic with Mister Garcia, with the blog members. At the beginning of the semester, Mister Garcia introduced us to logistics to get a first overview of the large field of logistics, as we all have different backgrounds in logistics as well.

Gradually, we worked out the topics of inventory control and queueing theory together. It was very interesting for me to learn that you can calculate queues, because like everyone, I have often stood in front of these queues and wasted time unnecessarily. The topic was very understandable, because Mister Garcia always mentioned practical examples from his life, which made the understanding of the topics much easier. From the middle to the end we have worked out the topics: warehousing, transportation and distribution. In these topics, a holistic view of logistics was taken and I understood the interrelationships of various processes better and better.

In summary, the logistics lecture was very exciting because we live in a globalized world and logistics is a very important factor in the current market and will become increasingly important in the future in relation to climate change. Also, the assignments and the improvement in the lectures were always helpful because you could reflect on your own mistakes.

Lesson learned

• Logistics does not consist of rigid numbers and processes that cannot be changed. On the contrary, logistics is a continuous improvement process.
• If you want to find solutions, you need a lot of data, which is difficult to provide in practice. Therefore, it is normal if you do not offer the perfect solution at the beginning.
• Hypothesis generation is a very important process in logistics, as many processes are interlinked. Therefore, it is not enough to just change a formula in Excel to get a solution.
• The topic of communication also plays a major role. At the beginning before the lecture, I thought that logistics only consisted of numbers and formulas that had to be calculated.
• The solution you develop for a company does not mean that this solution will be implemented, because the expectations and wishes are not always in harmony between the logistics manager and the management.
• The lessons with Mister Garcia were more about applying the knowledge in real cases and therefore in the real world. In Germany, my logistics lecture was only accompanied by process improvements and formulas. However, you cannot calculate communication in companies.
• Lastly, I learned that it is important to find pragmatic solutions. That means not always trying to work something out only with the numbers but observing the whole process from a bird’s eye view, because you can see what could go wrong and people are also a very important factor.