by Walther Ploos van Amstel
The expanding freight traffic in the courier, express, and parcel services (CEP) sector is increasingly posing major challenges to urban agglomerations. The main driver for this development is the dynamic growth of e-commerce, as it causes a change in consumer behavior towards an on-demand economy and continuous growth in the volume of shipments in the …
Amazon showed disappointing third-quarter results on fulfillment. The costs of fulfillment rose again, to now almost 31% of online sales. Year after year, these costs increase by one percentage point despite more sales. Growing volumes do not result in economy of scale at Amazon? Zalando is doing a better job. Zalando’s fulfillment costs are decreasing …
A mathematical model is developed by researchers from Vrije Universiteit Brussels and TU Eindhoven to calculate the costs of alternative distribution set-ups for last mile transportation in a FMCG supply chain with small and fragmented volumes. The model is based on input from logistics cost models for urban areas combined with cost variables related to …
Urban consolidation centres (UCCs) are a popular measure in city logistics. However, many UCCs strongly rely on government subsidies and are granted a short life because of their inability to reach financial sustainability. Despite the interest from both the practitioners and the research community, there are a limited number of quantitative contributions that investigate the …
Collaboration is standard practice in many supply chains, yet transaction costs often make it too expensive even so. Countless blog posts talk about the need for collaboration in the transport sector, in wholesale, in retail and with web stores.