Applying collaborative transportation management models in global third-party logistics

With the trends of e-commerce and globalization occurring in the economy, an effective global supply chain (GSC) management has become a business necessity for a multinational corporation seeking to secure market share. Although there has been much discussion on how a company gains competitive advantages through GSC management, the physical distribution of order fulfilment is less discussed in the literature. Global third-party logistics (3PL) has developed into an alternative for the needs of global distribution. In this paper, the authors present a new application of collaboration in GSC execution, namely collaborative transportation management (CTM), which can be used to reduce delivery time and improve delivery reliability. A case study is illustrated: the application of CTM by a 3PL provider in a notebook computer GSC. The implementation results show that the delivery cycle time and the total cost are simultaneously reduced.