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

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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.