Logistics management and firm size; a survey among Polish small and medium enterprises

Abstract

Managerial techniques in SMEs change together with their growth and logistics management constantly gets better support, adequate to requirements of smaller companies if financial and material assets are at their disposal. Those changes are reflected by various growth models of firms, showing that organisational forms should be in line with the quantity of the firms’ operations to be efficient. In those models stages consist of phases characterised by a specific type of division of labour and of co-ordination. In this paper we apply the Greiner's model to logistics, as this function in its broad sense represents management of a number of traditional activities such as warehousing, transport, customer service, etc. From a survey among Polish SMEs we learn that firms use different co-ordination mechanisms when they grow in size. Larger firms apply more formal management techniques, e.g. on inventory management and modelling as well as more sophisticated information systems to deal with the increased complexity they face. These results give empirical support to the conceptual growth models and provide the description of managerial environment for decision making in logistics.