Flow of goods and logistics: What does DIN 55402 actually stand for?

“If transport becomes difficult, you can earn even more money from it: Monika Dommann reports illuminating facts from the history of logistics.

There are competitions for everything and, of course, a German championship (“Stapler-Cup”) in forklift driving, since 2015 with a women’s class. The Philips company first came up with the aesthetically advanced idea of performing a forklift ballet. The occasion was 1959, Monika Dommann recalls in her book about the "material flow", the inauguration of one of the first European logistics centers in a Dutch village. Such centers, the further development of early modern port storage reinforced with reinforced concrete, cover large parts of the planet today; Amazon alone maintains 185 fulfillment centers worldwide.

In principle, a logistics center is a huge warehouse, a node in a network of goods flows, which in turn are linked to information flows in a complicated way. Factories, warehouses, railroads, truck fleets, container ships, the circulation of freight documents, the Internet, and finally the end consumer: all of this is connected in a system designed to ensure that objects are transported precisely and profitably to exactly where they are needed. This is the essence of civil logistics. Military logistics, which people are more likely to think of lately, works in a similar way, only more complicated because they have to react more often and more quickly to the unforeseen.

The forklift is one of the numerous technologies that keep the flow process moving. Without the manoeuvrable precision vehicle, hundreds of millions of Euro pallets would remain unstacked and therefore useless, that ingenious invention that is made according to regulations from eleven pest-resistant wooden boards, four blocks and 78 nails and can serve a wide variety of secondary purposes from the improvised speaker's platform to the barricade.

In a state of collective quasi-paralysis

Stacking is the flip side of flowing. There is no current without a traffic jam, which should not arise wildly if possible, but should be controlled. The ideal camp is a place of ongoing turnover, and therefore only of temporary standstill, if possible it should not be a "repository" - an extreme dead-end situation of protected persistence, about which Monika Dommann's book says little. The fever temperature of capitalism can be read from the condition of the camps. They should not be too empty and not too full. Both would indicate that something is wrong: overproduction, underconsumption or the "supply chain difficulties" that people have become accustomed to at least since the shock freezing of mobility in the corona pandemic.

The pandemic and then the Ukraine events uncovered an excess of circulation that already makes high globalization appear as a bygone era. The epitome of hypermobility was just-in-time production (JIT), to which Monika Dommann dedicated a particularly insightful chapter. Its basic principles appeared in American management literature after the First World War, and in the Second World War the new optimization theory of Operations Research emerged from war science, but it was not until the 1960s that the Japanese auto industry made JIT the basis of its production organization and at the same time a “philosophy of warehousing". It stated that road and rail transport could largely replace stockpiling.

A basic function of the camp was thus devalued: that of the buffer. At the latest with the great disruption of 2020, buffer reduction proved to be a good-weather philosophy. Suddenly there were no reserves, the warehousing doctrines of the management manuals turned out to be an illusion. Nevertheless, even in the state of collective quasi-paralysis, logistics was in demand, an industry that today employs around 600,000 people in Germany. If transport becomes difficult, you can earn more money from it. The global operators among the logistics companies made record profits in 2020/21.

Normalize, standardize, rationalize

As an accomplished historian of economics, technology and knowledge, Monika Dommann has a keen eye for the small objects and simple techniques that keep the large circular economy in constant rotation. It strikes a surprising arc from Toyota's modular vehicle production to self-optimization through the colored post-it notes from the American company 3M. The sticky note, just as ingeniously conceived as the paper clip, is not the archaic opposite of digitized life, but its indispensable enabling tool, a mini-infrastructure in the home and non-home office, which also includes the strengthening drink in the logistically epoch-making Tetra-Pak cardboard (on the market since 1951).

No less functional necessary is the symbolic lubricant of the simplest markings affixed to packaging around the globe. According to the unbelievably concise standard DIN 55402 – for “non-dangerous goods” – from 1961, eight characters are enough to avert harm from transported goods worldwide, beyond all natural languages and easily understandable even for illiterate people. The opened umbrella cannot be misunderstood: "Protect from moisture!"

Does Monika Dommann, who, by the way, has increased the reading flow-inhibiting gender to rare perfection, want to tell a big story in addition to the many lovingly researched episodes from the microcosm of flowing materiality? She doesn't seem entirely sure herself when she recommends considering each of the book's six chapters as autonomous and jumping into the book at will. It probably cannot be a straight line of constant norming, standardization and rationalization alone. This is well known, and the dialectic of the Enlightenment has gradually got around.

It becomes more interesting where there is resistance. So it was infinitely tedious and never entirely successful to standardize the wooden Euro pallet globally. It was shown, as Dommann concludes, "that the globalized economy was pushing for a pluralization of standards". It didn't always have to be exactly 78 nails.

The analog jump from the material flow to the flow of people is not dared in the book, presumably out of respectable professional caution. People do not "flow" around the globe like commodities, but they end up in the tens of millions in circumstances also called "warehouses." If “stock flow stagnation” is what mature capitalism must avoid at almost any cost, then human flow stagnation leads to contradictory consequences between the obstruction of theoretically “free” labor markets for highly skilled workers and the literal hopelessness of those stranded in what only appear to be makeshift tent cities.

Monika Dommann: "Material flow". A history of logistics at the places of its standstill. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2023. 288 p., ill., hardcover, €28.”