Inventory management or reduction is an obvious benefit that is often overlooked, but improved customer service is also a major benefit. A smoothly integrated end-to-end supply chain can result in substantial inventory reduction while greatly improving customer service. Quantifying the improvements in customer service is sometimes a challenge when justifying investment in supply chain infrastructure, but this type of goal can make sense to upper management.

Good luck!

Matthew: Totally agree with Rob and Patrice that quantifying customer service improvements or efficiencies in other areas of the organization can help make the business case. Thinking of a slight twist on this strategy, if you're able to quantify a financial return above and beyond a simple payback of the Logistics investment via Logistics-specific benefits, you could structure your business case so that it enables the excess to be applied toward funding another initiative with a higher corporate priority and more "sizzle". Now you've got people's attention and can leverage the visibility of those other initiatives to drive the business case through.

Part of our improvement in logistics was moving to hybrid warehousing/cross dock model where we were able to do JIT inventory management, bringing products into our facility by the pallet and shipping them out by the each on a daily basis. This allowed us to not only reduce the footprint of warehouses that we needed, but also allowed us to turn inventory 10-15 times before payment was due. The increased cash flow then allowed us to spend far more on advertising, causing a virtuous cycle of accelerated sales -> lowered costs of goods/transit per unit -> higher profitability.

Managing inventory to identify what is missing and reduce products loss.
Logistics to guarantee on time delivery and identify what went wrong in case of incidents.
Automated customer services to meet their demands having a lower time response.
KPIs development to measure results.

From my experience, one of the biggest benefits is improved in-stock levels at shelf. In a bricks & mortar store this means:
(1) You have the item the consumer wants and make the sale today, you keep the consumer in your store vs. losing the sale (& maybe the cart) to a competitor. Not every consumer will switch to another item.

(2) You improve forecasting of store-level sales by reducing volatility of sales. This volatility during special events (such as in the flyer, on display, during new product launch) is especially crucial as retailers will set store-level orders for future similar events on historical sales. So if you ran out mid-week, next time you get enough to run out mid-week.

(3) Saving money by avoiding expedited high-cost transportation to fix out of stocks during critical periods

(4) Presenting a better image to consumers, prevents them from permanently switching to competitors.

(5) Improving productivity for store operations, keeping staff on assigned task vs. being distracted as they look for missing items for customers by hunting in a disorganized back room. In normalizing this process you can either reduce head count or reallocate staff to higher value activities.

I know there are parallel benefits in e-commerce operations but for the sake of brevity will cut it off here for now.

In case of large company there are different activities and branches. So many company decide to divide work for smooth running, storing , marketing, distributing ,so logistic and out sourcing are inevitable.

SCM

In commerce , supply-chain management ( SCM ), the management of the flow of goods and services.

It involves the movement and storage of raw materials , of work-in-process inventory , and of finished goods from point of origin to point of consumption.

Any definitional thoughts?

One way to be CAPEX efficient and thus reduce the risks is looking for established 3rd party logistics service providers. Especially in storage handling.
Secondly, think about how to integrate your large scale customers with your supply chains. This will be a great way to reduce storage costs, and also minimize the working capital. Also it is a way to maximize the service quality / customer satisfaction.

I hope this helps.