Fourth party logistics, a term coined by global consulting firm Accenture, “an integrator that assembles the resources, capabilities, and technology of its own organization and other organizations” (for example, carriers) to provide comprehensive supply chain solutions.
Published in Chapter:
Electronic Logistics Marketplaces
Yingli Wang (Cardiff Business School, UK), Mohamed Naim (Cardiff Business School, UK), and Andrew Potter (Cardiff Business School, UK)
Copyright: © 2010
|Pages: 9
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-611-7.ch022
Abstract
As B2B e-business shifted to the Internet, Electronic Marketplaces (EMs) have grown rapidly in usage (Rask & Kragh, 2004). Definitions of an EM are diverse. One of the earliest and broadest definitions is offered by Bakos (1991), who referred to an EM as “an inter-organizational system that allows the participating buyers and sellers to exchange information about price and product offerings”. In the context of logistics, EMs can be termed Electronic Logistics Marketplaces (ELMs), referring to an electronic hub using web-based systems that link shippers and carriers together for the purpose of collaboration and/or trading (Wang, Potter, & Naim, 2007a). ELM is a context specific type of EM, which facilitates the provision of logistics services. Traditional forms of communication between a shipper and a carrier are rather fragmented when a shipper has a number of carriers to manage. Such one-toone exchanges can be costly and sometimes very time-consuming. Communicating through an ELM allows the connection of a number of shippers and carriers using a single interface, normally a Webbased system. This has brought advantages to organizations in terms of low cost inter-organization information connectivity, (near) real time visibility, and flexible partnership configurations.