چارچوب کارت امتیازی متوازن کلی برای ارائه دهنده خدمات لجستیک شخص ثالث

To provide valuable support for successful decision-making, managers needs a balanced set of financial and non-financial measures that represent different requirements, strategic goals, strategies, resources, and capabilities and the causal relationships between these domains. The balanced scorecard (BSC) is such a measurement system. Although much discussion has taken place in industries and academia circles for the development of BSC for third party logistics (3PL) service provider, little research exists which studies and develops BSC strategies for 3PL service providers. This study proposed a set of strategies for BSC of 3PL service providers. We devised a strategies framework for all the four BSC perspectives of the various functions of 3PL service providers and the weightages for the different strategies are evaluated using Delphi analysis. The implementation of the proposed framework in a 3PL company is also discussed.

In this intensive and competitive environment that we live in, many firms are considering the logistics outsourcing option, in order to streamline their value chains. Third party logistics (3PL) service providers are typically addressed in the context of long term outsourcing of logistics activities by a manufacturer (Sink et al., 1996 and Razzaque and Sheng, 1998). We define 3PL service providers as companies, which perform the various logistics activities of a customer either completely or only in part (Delfmann et al., 2002; Lai et al., 2004). These functions can include traditional activities such as transporting, warehousing, packaging, etc. but could also include some conventional activities such as customs clearance, billing as well as tracking and tracing. In the last decade, the development of 3PL service providers has gained importance. The increasing importance of efficiency and a focus on core competencies opened up many business opportunities for 3PL service providers (Christopher, 1998a and Christopher, 1998b). The expectation of customers on shorter delivery times and more accurate services has increased considerably. As a result, the control complexity of logistics service providers has also increased significantly. Performance indicators can support the management of complex systems. It is to be observed that no single performance indicator can give a full picture regarding performance. Each indicator presents a partial view from a specific viewpoint and is therefore not enough to serve as a basis for management decisions. Historically, companies concentrated on financial indicators. Nowadays, it is widely recognized that non-financial and even intangible indicators can give valuable information as well (Brewer and Speh, 2000). But, such indicators are more difficult to measure and compare (Kleijnen and Smits, 2003). In recent years, both practitioners and researchers have emphasized the need to move beyond the financial measures of an operation and to incorporate a much wider variety of non-financial metrics in an organization's performance reporting and reward systems (Kaplan, 1998). A popular performance measurement scheme suggested by Kaplan and Norton (1992) is the balanced scorecard (BSC) that employs performance metrics from financial, customer, internal processes and growth perspectives. By combining these different perspectives, BSC helps managers to understand the inter-relationships and tradeoffs between alternative performance dimensions, thus leading to improved decision making and problem solving. Logistics operations, the core of 3PL industry, can be very volatile, which is why there is always a need to be constantly updated with tools and development strategies that keep it sustainable. The balanced scorecard is a useful performance tool that ensures a method for determining initiatives for strategic planning support, systematic updates, and developments on initiatives and metrics, as well as a balanced measurement for internal and external aspects. The use of a balanced scorecard helps in examining all the areas in 3PL operations that may affect results and it can also help in improving efficiency and effectiveness in 3PL operations management, thus promoting better structure, management and success. The performance measurement and metrics pertaining to 3PL providers have not received adequate attention from researchers or practitioners, though the metrics of measuring the performance on logistics services of 3PL providers have an important role to play in setting objectives, evaluating performance and determining future plans of actions. Olson and Slater (2002) showed that the competitive strategy and the BSC have a significant relationship on firm's performance. So, the BSC has been well accepted as a reliable tool for business operations, but the difficulty in the implementation of BSC is, the identification of strategies which represent the most critical performance aspects of corporate operations. This paper develops a framework and a model for the identification of a set of strategies for all the perspective levels of the BSC of 3PL service providers. The intention is to provide a ready-reckon framework and model which can be used as a base to develop and implement a customized BSC for any 3PL service provider.

To manage performance, organizations need to understand where they are, where they are going and what needs to be done to get to where they want to be in the future. Without a strategic performance management approach, it is impossible to address these fundamental issues. Well designed performance management approaches and performance indicators enable managers to track whether their organization is moving in the right direction or not. The BSC has proven to be a powerful means of translating strategy into action and ensuring that organizations focus on what really matters to their success. It helps managers to clarify the value proposition as well as the drivers and enablers of success. In today's world, it is the performance drivers, especially the intangibles and the way these are managed and deployed, that distinguishes successful organizations from the rest. While the specifics of a balanced scorecard differ from organization to organization; it is beneficial to build upon a standard framework, such as the one attempted here, rather than starting from scratch and BSC framework proposed here will be a solution accelerator that will help 3PL companies who want to implement a balanced scorecard for their organization. Many companies are attracted by the power and simplicity of the balanced scorecard concept, but then discover that the development and implementation is extremely time-consuming and expensive. The present work focused on the 3PL industry and consisted of identifying the strategic objectives for 3PL service providers from all the four perspectives of the BSC. A modified Q-sort method was employed and based on the placement ratio, a framework was devised for all the four perspectives of various functions of 3PL service providers. The weightage of each strategic objective was determined through Delphi study. The way of putting the framework into practice is also validated through the explanation of the adoption of the proposed framework in a 3PL company. The contribution of this paper is the proposal of a generic framework that helps in developing a balanced scorecard for the 3PL industry that can measure and evaluate day-to-day business operations from the following four perspectives: finance, customer, internal business process, and learning and growth. The proposed work is comparatively a new initiative in the direction of developing a BSC system for adoption in the 3PL industry. The salient features of the generic framework are: consideration of all the four – financial, internal, customer and innovation and learning – perspectives, and definition of weightage for each perspective as well as for each strategy within each perspective. The generic balanced scorecard framework developed in this paper will help 3PL organizations develop and build a scorecard economically and facilitate analysis of measures so that corrective action can take place promptly. The framework provides a comprehensive and cost-effective way to deploy the balanced scorecard and deliver better returns on people, processes, customers, and technologies.