Five logistics elements include quality, quantity, time, place and price. Quality means consistent quality of goods during transportation process. Quantity refers to compliance with economic quantity requirement and maximum possibility of full load round-trip transportation. Time stands for timely delivery at a reasonable  cost. Place means well-planned gathering places and warehouses to avoid ineffective transportations or mutiple transits. Price refers to lowest logistics cost while ensuring quality and timeliness. 

Purpose of logistics management is to realize required client service in condition of possibly lowest overall cost, i.e. seeking a dynamic balance of service advantage and cost advantage, and hence creating the enterprise's strategic advantages in competition. Aiming to this target, logistics management basically addresses the issue that suitable products of appropriate quantity are delivered at a reasonable cost to appropriate places within a suitable time.

Logistics management stresses solving problems by systematic method. Modern logistics generally consists of transportation, storage, packaging, handling, circulation / processing, distrubtion and information processing. Each part of these has its own functions, benefits and concepts. A systematic method is, by modern management approaches and techniques, to share general information among all the parts, organize and manage these parts as an integrated system, enabling the system provide competitive services at a possibly low cost. In systematic method, the system benefits are not simple sum-up of various part benefit. It adopts an analysis and evaluation of all influencing factors for one specific problem. In line with this methology, logistics system does not simply pursue the lowest cost in each part, because mutual effects and restrictions exist among various parts. For example, over stress on packaging cost saving would probably bring the transportation and handling cost surge due to tendency of package breakage. Therefore, systematic method emphasizes overall cost analysis to avoid suboptimal effect, and cost balance analysis to reach designated client satisfactoin at a low total cost.