The innovative concept of Virtual Warehouse is fruit of some tendencies of management in action today, for the survival in a more and more threatened market from a competition of total level and turbulences that render the cycle of life of more and more short product.
Between these tendencies, already dealt previously, are sure from numbering outsourcing of the business activities that do not re-enter in accompanied Core business from a greater organizational flexibility, and use of the Information and Communication Technology in the supplying procedures, with the scope to save resources to assign to the characteristic activity.
Just as far as the outsourcing of the supplying procedures, a recent surveying previews that 50% of the European and American companies will adopt, within next the three years, solutions of outsourcing in the within of the operations of procurement, against it puts into effect them 22% that has already one in so far as strategy.
Through outsourcing of all the those activities that do not re-enter between those comprised in the excellence area, the enterprise can concentrate the resources on the production of goods and services, their quality, the design and therefore on the distintive competences with which creating useful value for the enterprises customers (in practical the enterprise new organization to net of the division of labor succeeds to reorganize the own structure with one).
In this new scene of extensive enterprise it is gone delineating a model of chain of extended supply, in which the activity of logistics it is not resolved in the single activity of rationalization of supplyings of raw materials and the distribution of finished products, but comprises all with of activities that allow the physical and informative flow of the goodses, to the just place and the just moment, to the inside of the productive chain.
We have already said as the electronic instruments of purchase change to second of the models of management of the supply relationships, of the level of collaboration that can be minimal in the discreet transaction and high in the relational exchange.
Just in the within of the development of the relationships of collaboration, pushed from the tendency to the simplification of the organizational structure, the two more innovative solutions are represented from the outsourcing of the purchase procedures, and from the sharing of the warehouse availabilities, through the creation of a Virtual Warehouse.
The term has been coined from Dr. Marino Vincenzo, currently general executive manager of the Unitec D, and be already from some year recognized from the dictionary of the published Digital Economy from the Sole24Ore.
The virtual warehouse is born from the sharing, between operating companies in the same field, than materials type of or member are resupplied of the same and operate in the same territory, of the warehouse availabilities.
The idea I found on the hypothesis of exclusion of the contemporary, demonstrated every day in simple way, from the only present spare wheel in our motors vehicle (is in fact highly improbable that holes more than a wheel to the time), and that it finds its mathematical demonstration in the law empiricist of the case of Laplace.
The objective is therefore that one of the reduction of equal supplyes presents in all the warehouses.
For which an enterprise it will have always the immediate availability of the material or member, but it can not have of the physical presence in warehouse.
The same thing happens in the just in Time, with the difference that in the Virtual Warehouse the concepts of outsourcing take part of the process of supplying, and sharing of warehouse infrastructures.
The Virtual Warehouse, can be defined like a physicist-computer science hybrid, in the sense that the physical availability of the materials regards only the present supplyes in the own infrastructures, while the rest of the materials of which the enterprise Virtual Warehouse can need is present in that called entity, which provisions and resupplies the subjects in the moment in which the member/material effectively it is demanded.
The Virtual Warehouse represents one possibility of cost reduction, through the reduction of immobilizations, introduced from one flexible management of the supplyes by means of their sharing with other subjects.
The operation is assured from an external subject, provider of services (figure 17), which it has the visibility of the total supplyes and, through systems informed and managerial procedures dedicated to us, manages the warehouses calculating the necessities of the companies and the levels of redundancy of materials to the inside of the district.
In our case provider the Unitec will be in a position to predisposing of time in time to favor of the customers, second the requirements and the type of products to provision, instruments and computer science applications on measure, thanks to the experience matured in this field.
The demands for material journey for the provider same, that it arranges supplying from adherent an inner warehouse to the group of the companies, or, eventually, from an external supplier (figure 17).
The Virtual Warehouse needs of a informatizations of common base to the enterprises participants and the adoption of procedures and protocols standard, so as to to have a complete homogeneity of they give to you uses you in system ³⁵ .

Figure 17: Flow of supply enll' outsoucing of processes ³⁶ .

Figure 18: Virtual warehouse of district ³⁷ .

• Notes 35: Giuseppe Agus, 2003, the Virtual Warehouse of Unitec: Application to a Sanitary District , University of the Studies of Naples Parthenope
• Notes 36: Feature from the situated one www.logisticamente.it
• Notes 37: Feature from the situated one www.unitec.it