E-marketplaces to consolidate Urban Road Freight Flows

Details

Supervisors

Jourquin, Bart

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en Ingénieur de gestion

Abstract

The main research question that is addressed in this research master’s thesis is if and how open online platforms or e-marketplaces can help achieve higher levels of consolidation in the urban road freight industry. This subject is therefore supply chain oriented and more precisely related to city logistics. The motivation of this research is to make urban freight transport more socially, environmentally and economically sustainable by increasing the level of consolidation of freight flows through open e-marketplaces. We believe higher level of freight flow consolidation can be achieved through more collaboration between economic actors. We are interested by collaboration that could be initiated through open online platforms. E-marketplaces are traditionally defined as “electronic information exchange systems, where the transportation offer actors meet the transportation demand ones” (Gonzalez-Felui & Morana, 2011). On such type of platforms, the supply of transportation services comes from transport service providing companies, whereas demand for transportation services comes either from firms with a need for transportation or from transport providers who do not have enough demand to fill a freight vehicle and therefore would like to have their goods transported by another transport provider. Importantly, we are more interested by structural partnerships between firms that could be formed through online platforms and less by occasional and irregular matching of demand and supply. It appears that in this industry there are a lot of different stakeholders with each of them having different stakes and interests when it comes down to transport of goods. As a result, this makes more collaboration difficult to see the light as there are little incentives to combine loads if each party that could take part in the collaboration process only takes into consideration its own internal costs and requirements. Our goal is to find out if e-marketplaces can effectively overcome this difficulty. To answer our research question we tested the following hypothesis: online platforms can help achieve higher level of consolidation in urban areas by acting as an orchestrator optimizing freight flows at a multi-company level. The solution should be able to fulfil different parties’ requirements and there should be an incentive for the players to join the network. To verify this, we tested 2 other hypotheses. Firstly, that the existing technological environment is robust enough to fulfil different stakeholder’s requirements in relation with transportation services. Secondly, that the adoption of e-marketplaces by demand and supply side stakeholders to be facilitated by the economic incentive to reduce transportation costs or to increase revenues in a very competitive industry. We tested our hypotheses by interviewing local industry players and observers.