structural:reformatting
Definition

Jomini originally defined logistics as:

... l'art de bien ordonner les marches d'une armée, de bien combiner l'ordre des troupes dans les colonnes, les tems de leur départ, leur itinéraire, les moyens de communications nécessaires pour assurer leur arrivée à point nommé...

... the art of well-ordering the functionings of an army, of well combining the order of troops in columns, the times of their departure, their itinerary, the means of communication necessary to assure their arrival at a named point...

The Oxford English Dictionary defines logistics as "the branch of military science relating to procuring, maintaining and transporting material, personnel and facilities". However, the New Oxford American Dictionary defines logistics as "the detailed coordination of a complex operation involving many people, facilities, or supplies", and the Oxford Dictionary on-line defines it as "the detailed organization and implementation of a complex operation". As such, logistics is commonly seen as a branch of engineering that creates "people systems" rather than "machine systems".

According to the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (previously the Council of Logistics Management), logistics is the process of planning, implementing and controlling procedures for the efficient and effectivetransportation and storage of goods including services and related information from the point of origin to the point of consumption for the purpose of conforming to customer requirements and includes inbound, outbound, internal and external movements.

Academics and practitioners traditionally refer to the terms operations or production management when referring to physical transformations taking place in a single business location (factory, restaurant or even bank clerking) and reserve the term logistics for activities related to distribution, that is, moving products on the territory. Managing a distribution center is seen, therefore, as pertaining to the realm of logistics since, while in theory, the products made by a factory are ready for consumption they still need to be moved along the distribution network according to some logic, and the distribution center aggregates and processes orders coming from different areas of the territory. That being said, from a modeling perspective, there are similarities between operations management and logistics, and companies sometimes use hybrid professionals, with for example a "Director of Operations" or a "Logistics Officer" working on similar problems. Furthermore, the term " supply chain management " originally referred to, among other issues, having an integrated vision of both production and logistics from point of origin to point of production. All these terms may suffer from semantic change as a side effect of advertising.