Bud La Londe remembers the day every independent supply chain professional in the United States fit in a single room in Saranac Lake, New York to shake hands. This was 1956, just a decade since the close of World War II. Wooden pallets were still new technology.

“There were twenty-one members at the original meeting,” recalls La Londe, then just 21 years old himself. “They stood alone from both American Management Association and the U.S. civilian government and U.S. military.” Their new field? Physical distribution. Their subject? Most every product sold in the United States.

For fifty years, corporate America had honed its abilities at advertising and sales. Now they had figured out how to sell products nationally; the problem was figuring out how to get those products where they had to be when they had to be there. Leading companies like Johnson & Johnson, General Foods, and General Mills struggled with their own success. “Companies were getting very concerned about their distribution cost,” La Londe says. “They had to distribute lost-cost products fairly large distances.”

As executives explained the problems inherent in wide-scale distribution, the early experts at Saranac Lake turned to technology for solutions. “For the first time, people were thinking of unit loads, shipping them by pallet rather than by case,” says La Londe. “At the same time, computer technology was rapidly advancing.” Customer and order data expanded exponentially. “People could measure what they were doing-cost, on-time delivery, damage, warehouse productivity-a lot better. Instead of this being done by people with green eye shades, it was now done by machines.”

Mastering the machines meant whole new subjects of study. Almost immediately after the Saranac Lake meeting, La Londe entered the Ph.D. program in business administration at Michigan State-the first to offer an academic minor in physical distribution. Meanwhile, much expanded from their original twenty-one members, integrated transportation, warehousing, and inventory visionaries officially incorporated in 1963 as the National Council of Physical Distribution Management. Physical distribution had progressed from buzz word to central business concept.

“This organization was very formative in terms of its impact on the field,” says La Londe. “Fifty percent of the members came to their annual meeting. They had roundtables across the country. This was almost a religion.”

In time, concerned parties expanded their focus from the warehouse-to-customer route all the way back to manufacturing. “We went to the acquisitions process: in-bound transportation, purchasing, quality control, integrating inventory, handling orders,” La Londe says. To keep up with the competition, only worrying about “the end of the line” was no longer enough. As a field, physical distribution had given way to logistics. In 1985, the National Council of Physical Distribution Management, now some 16,000 members strong, changed its name to the Council of Logistics Management.

Yet the pace of change only increased in the lead up to a new millennia. As logistics had overtaken physical distribution, now global supply chain theory in many cases superseded logistics. “In that second phase, we had a network going from source to user,” explains La Londe. “What a supply chain really does, it goes external to the firm: I have to understand how my entire system works and how my partners in this process add value. This third phase was really brought about by globalization and progress in information technology-the ability to manage globally an inventory that you can't see and don't own.”

Last January, the Council of Logistics Management again changed its name, this time to the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals. La Londe, now a professor emeritus of logistics after four decades at Ohio State, predicts further expansions in the decades to come. Between production, marketing, and purchasing, he observes, “right now there's a big battle going on about who's going to win the prize of managing the supply chain. Some people think it's the president's job.” wt