Advantage of Third Party Logistics In Supply Chain Management.pdf

Hitotsubashi University Repository Title Advantage of Third Party Logistics in Supply Chain Management Author(s) Nemoto, Toshinori; Tezuka, Koichiro Citation Issue Date 2002-01-15 Type Technical Report Text Version publisher URL /10086/16053 Right Advantage of Third Party Logistics in Supply Chain Management Toshinori Nemoto Graduate School of Commerce and Management, Hitotsubashi University Naka, Kunitachi, Tokyo 186-8601, Japan cc00330@srv.cc.hit-u.ac.jp Koichiro Tezuka Graduate School of Commerce and Management, Hitotsubashi University Naka, Kunitachi, Tokyo 186-8601, Japan BZE12763@ 1. Introduction Logistics has been called the last frontier that even at the present time, the improvement of logistics has been the primary source of firms to make new profits and maintain competitive advantage. There are also several instances where the logistics system has become the cause of bottlenecks in the firm’s overall management. The potential for reducing total cost and for improving the quality of services provided to customers can be increased through the elimination of these bottlenecks. Also, from the social standpoint, an efficient logistics system could offer possibilities to reduce road congestion and environmental pollution, which could result in increased macroscopic economic productivity. Several innovations have been developed to advance the logistics system. These innovations can be classified broadly into innovations to improve individual processes of logistics, and innovations to improve the logistics system totally. The former includes innovative hardware such as new inter-modal terminals with efficient transshipment ability, and innovative software such as truck route planning with ITS (Intelligent Transport System) and GPS (Global Positioning System). These piecemeal innovations can be developed to their full abilities only when they are employed into improving bottlenecks. However,