Background of logistics outsourcing generation The generation of logistics outsourcing has distinct era economic background: First is the necessity to reinforce core competitiveness. Since 1990s, core competitiveness is regarded as the decisive force enterprises depend on to win and expand advantages in market competition, its abundant connotation reflects in technology resources, knowledge and culture, as well as organizations and management system. Because resource owned by any enterprise is limited, it is impossible to win competitive advantages in all business fields. Some enterprises possess core technological abilities, core manufacturing ability, but no core marketing ability, core coordinating and supervising ability in enterprise organizations, or core ability in enterprise strategic management. In the rapidly changed market competition, individual enterprises rely on their resource to conduct self-control, with the rate difficult to catch up with the rate of market change. Therefore, enterprises must focus limited recourse on core business, thus reinforcing their own core competence, and hand over business that they have no core competence in to external organizations via contract (outsourcing) or no contract (strategic alliances or cooperation). By sharing information, undertaking risks, and sharing profits with external organizations, the above five core competence can be integrated, thus wining competitive advantage with core competitiveness of supply chain. Second is the necessity to transfer from enhancing internal efficiency to enhancing external efficiency. The improvement of enterprise management efficiency originates from two aspects. From the very beginning, enterprises seek for internal efficiency enhancement. Organizational performance can be improved from adjustment of enterprise internal organization structure, organizational flattening, and restructuring of business procedures. With further development, more and more enterprises are not satisfied with enhancement in internal efficiency, instead, they focus on external enterprises to seek for cooperation between enterprises, thus providing great opportunities for the generation of logistics outsourcing. Third is the development of e-commerce and appearance of virtual organizations. On the one hand, with the appearance of Internet, Internet economy and e- commerce have been in rapid development, higher requirements have been hold toward logistics. Many enterprises that have successfully conducted e-commerce have first-...
