On this day – 1993 and the silent revolution: how GPS transformed logistics

In the early 1990s, a technology designed for military use began to quietly change the way goods were transported around the world. In 1993, GPS took a key step towards civilian use and marked a turning point in logistics. Until the early 1990s, logistics planning relied heavily on human expertise: paper maps, knowledge of the territory and rigid schedules. Detours, traffic jams and unforeseen events were managed reactively and, in many cases, without real-time information. Everything began to change when, in 1993, the GPS system reached a level of availability and stability that allowed for its widespread civilian use. Although GPS had been developed by the US Department of Defence decades earlier, its gradual opening up to civilian use marked a turning point for mobility-intensive sectors such as logistics and transport. For the first time, companies were able to know the exact position of their vehicles in real time, something that seems trivial today, but which at the time represented a huge technological leap. This capability allowed...

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