Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of online retail giant Amazon, has been inducted into the Logistics Hall of Fame. While Bezos himself was unable to attend the ceremony in Berlin, Germany, 170 international guests from various niches of industry, science, politics and the media were in attendance.
Roy Perticucci, vice president, Amazon Europe customer fulfillment, accepted the award on Bezos’s behalf.
Michael ten Hompel, managing director of the Fraunhofer IML and himself a member of the Logistics Hall of Fame, paid tribute to Bezos’s entrepreneurial performance which, he said, not only reinvented Internet commerce and the media world through the combination of software and logistics, but also provided a blueprint for a new Logistics 4.0.
Jeff Bezos becomes the 33rd member of the Logistics Hall of Fame. He was elected in September by an international expert jury from a total of 17 candidates from eight countries. (Note: Dave Blanchard, MH&L’s editor-in-chief, is a member of the jury.)
Previously inducted members of the Logistics Hall of Fame include UPS founder James Casey, Fedex founder Frederick Smith, entrepreneur and logistics benefactor Klaus-Michael Kühne, as well as the contract logistics pioneers Heinz Fiege and Hugo Fiege, and Austrian logistics entrepreneur Heidi Senger-Weiss. Among others posthumously voted into the Hall of Fame include the post office founders of Thurn und Taxis, truck inventor Gottlieb Daimler, Gottfried Schenker as a pioneer of combined transportation, assembly line inventors Henry Ford and Ransom Eli Olds, Eugene Clark, the inventor of the forklift truck, Malcom McLean, father of containerization, and Japanese Toyota manager Taiichi Ohno, who developed the just-in-time concept.
