The Relationship of Line and Staff Personnel in Physical Distribution Organisations

Organisation of the physical distribution function within business firms is a recent development in the United States. The development of physical distribution organisational structures has generally taken the form of a firm transferring the warehousing, traffic, order processing, inventory, and purchasing responsibilities from many individual departments to a single management unit headed by a distribution manager. The reason for this departmental re‐shuffling has not been just to streamline decision making, but rather, to make the firm's physical distribution operations more effective and efficient.