Engineering collaborative approaches for sustainable and thriving collaboration in the logistics operations across value chains

在当今的全球经济中，越来越多的公司已经接受了范式转变，即他们不能单独作为自主企业竞争，而是必须通过形成竞争性价值链来加强与供应商和客户的关系。价值链中业务单元的决策自主权要求开发协作方法来协调向最终客户交付产品/服务所需的分布式活动，从而在市场上具有竞争力。物流活动中的合作将价值链内的业务单位联系起来，通过提供诸如节省成本，缩短交货时间等巨大利益，为这一努力做出了贡献。最近，通过扩展不同价值链中各业务部门的合作，揭示了物流活动中新的协同效应的机会。在这个研究项目中，我们研究了新颖的协作方法，使公司能够从物流中的跨价值链协作中受益，这考虑到每个参与业务单位在价值链内的现有协作。目标是开发全系统一致和综合的协作方法，为每个参与的业务单位提供激励，以实现最高的物流协同效应。由于价值链内部和跨价值链的物流活动发生在不断变化的商业环境中，决策者是其绩效的核心，因此将在动态和人类行为维度的区域案例研究中举例说明协作方法。这个多公司案例研究将在加拿大历史上重要和有前途的（新生物经济时代）工业部门进行：林产品工业。重点将放在产品运往国内/国际市场之前的密集运输上，这是一项对加拿大具有高度经济和环境影响的物流活动。该项目的研究工作将带来更强大、稳定和人类兼容的协作方法，以支持价值链内部和跨价值链的物流运营中可持续和繁荣的合作。这将降低物流成本，提高服务水平，提高价值链合作伙伴之间的公平性，最后但并非最不重要的是，减少对环境的负面影响。

In today’s global economy, increasing numbers of companies have embraced the paradigm shift that they cannot compete as solely autonomous businesses, but rather have to strengthen their relations with their suppliers and customers by forming a competitive value chain. The decision-making autonomy of the business units within the value chain requires the development of collaborative approaches to coordinate the distributed activities needed to deliver the products/services to end-customers and thus be competitive on markets. Collaboration in the logistics activities linking business units within a value chain has contributed to this endeavour by delivering great benefits such as cost-savings, shorter delivery time, etc. Recently, an opportunity for new synergies in logistics activities was revealed by extending the collaboration across business units in different value chains. In this research program, we study novel collaborative approaches enabling companies to benefit from cross value chains collaboration in logistics, and this taking into account the existing collaboration within the value chain of each participating business unit. The objective is to develop system-wide aligned and integrated collaborative approaches that provide incentives to each participating business unit to aim toward the highest logistics synergies. Because logistics activities within and across value chains take place in a changing business environment and decision makers are at the core of their performance, the collaborative approaches will be exemplified in a regional case study with dynamic and human-behavioural dimensions. This multi-company case study will be conducted in a historically important and promising (new bio-economy era) industrial sector for Canada: the forest products industry. The focus will be on the intensive transportation taking place before products are shipped to the national/international markets, a logistics activity having high economic and environmental impacts for Canada. The research work in this program will lead to more robust, stable and human compatible collaborative approaches that support sustainable and thriving collaboration in the logistics operations within and across value chains. This will results in reduced logistics costs, increased service level, increased fairness among the value chains partners and last but not least, decreased negative environmental impact.