Collaborative Transportation Sharing: From Theory to Practice via a Case Study from France

Background

In the last years, several strategies and logistics models have been developed in order to increase the supply chain effectiveness. Collaboration is one of the most promising areas of study in supply chain management (Lambert et al., 1996; Barrat, 2004; Min et al., 2005; Simatupang & Sridharan, 2005; Lambert, 2008). In supply chain management, collaboration can take place at several stages of the chain and with different levels of interaction. These different levels of interaction can be classified as follows, by Crainic and Laporte (1997) for freight transportation and by Baglin et al. (2009) for collaborative logistics:

• •

  Transactional collaboration: Logistics and transportation need consistent administrative practices and document exchanges. The first stage of collaboration consists of the common coordination and standardization of administrative practices and exchange techniques, requiring information and communication systems.

• •

  Informational collaboration: This level of collaboration concerns mutual exchange of information such as sales forecasts, stock levels and delivery dates. It is important to note, that confidentiality and the process of competition can hinder collaboration.

• •

  Decisional collaboration: This category concerns the different collaboration possibilities in planning and management decisions within logistics and transportation. These decisions can belong to different planning stages:

  • o

    Operational planning: This planning stage is related to daily operations that can be coordinated or shared, like freight transportation or cross-docking.

  • o

    Tactical planning: The middle-term planning stage involves several tactical decisions, like sales forecasts, shipping operational decisions, stock and production management and quality control. At this level, sharing decisions can establish a relation of trust between the collaborators.

  • o

    Strategic planning: The highest collaboration stage is related to long term planning decisions such as network design, facility location, finance and production planning.