The global economy is booming. The world economic outlook issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in April this year reports a global economic growth rate of 4.4% for 2011 and 4.5% for 2012. This development is not only driven by the uprising economies in Asia. Also the mature western industry nations like Germany and the United States show significant after crisis growth rates.

Along with this market development the global trade is increasing. The export oriented German economy for example showed a logistics volume worth 210 billion Euro and is expected to generate 220 billion Euro in 2011 of which about 50 per cent are related to intralogistics.

Regardless this current optimistic outlook, the consulting firm Barkawi Management Consultants advises companies to prepare for the next downturn right now which might appear earlier as expected. The Munich based management consultants suggest capitalizing on saving potentials especially in the field of intralogistics. “The globalized economic system becomes more and more logistics intensive”, says Dr. Andreas Baader, Managing Partner at Barkawi. “Companies undertook a lot of effort to optimize their transportation and distribution systems over the last years. But levers and potentials in intralogistics have mostly been neglected”, adds Dr. Baader.

Barkawi Management Consultants calculated a saving potential in the field of intralogistics of 12 billion Euro for the German market alone representing about 15% of non outsourced intralogistics costs in this market. To optimize their intralogistics operations, companies should look into various areas such as outsourcing ratio, route optimization of internal transports, reduction of IT and maintenance costs, order entry and order management as well as capacity optimization of staff and infrastructure.