Just want to heartily agree with this point here. Certainly many of us do get excited about particular business domains from time to time, but in my own experience, I get more excited about technical challenges, and -- critically -- solving real problems for real customers that I can see first- or nearly-first-hand. The customers for this "product" would be internal to OP's org, so the people who end up building this would have front-row seats to how it's being used, what's good, what's bad, etc.
Even with all the good words he wrote how company can improve by doing own dev - reality is that company makes money in logistics and as a software dev I would be second class citizen and cost center.
That is why I much rather work in company that makes money on software, because here I am money making.
At Meta, I hear Ads has one of the more toxic environments for SWEs, even though Ads make money.
If software can make the company provide better logistics more efficiently, it's not a cost center, it's an enabler. It pays for itself in reduced costs and increased revenue.
A smart management team can figure out that investing in IT, Software, etc is going to have a positive ROI overall by increasing efficiency among other things.
Unfortunately my experience (and many others') is that only the balance sheet will be considered and the goal will always be to reduce the costs in cost centres as much as possible.
Even in a company that doesn't fall fully into that trap, often times a lot of effort needs to be expended to keep funding at current levels, never mind the rituals involved in getting increased funding for new projects, hardware, staff, etc.
Generally the more obvious the connection between your work and company revenue, the easier your life will be.
Which means that if investing in IT is an enabler for gaining revenue or profit, it's not a cost center by this definition--it's necessary to gain revenue or profit. As you note, many companies don't appear to be smart enough to see this, but that doesn't make it wrong.
None?
It's a cost center in the same way the janitorial staff or legal are. The company won't be there without contracts or with overflowing trashcans, but it doesn't mean the company is making money off of janitorial services or drafting contracts.
Everyone’s a cost. The myth of revenue centres was made up by sales & marketing.
But it still doesn’t make company dynamics not true. Logistics company will have bunch of logistics specialists as management and they will see it as revenue center and will see „their own kind of people” as more important.
That idea of costs and profit centers is bullshit that only bad manager believe in. It may or may not be the case with the one company of the OP, we don't nearly enough information to judge.
(But the fact that the OP is reaching into IT with the goal of improving their people's productivity is a very weak indication that they are better than that.)
I am only pointing out my view on it based on my years of experience working in different companies. Looking by up votes it seems my experience to be applicable for other people as well, so I guess it might be useful for the OP.
Funny that sales and marketing sells and markets itself.
If you're interested in following this strategy, don't hesitate to reach out to [email protected] -- I'd be happy to help on both fronts.
As for your concern about logistics being not sexy enough - I've found that the best programmers (and the ones you'd want) are more interested in the technical aspects of the problem and business and customer impact, rather than the sexiness of the business domain.