تامین تجهیزات خدمات لجستیکی؛ یک کار فوری و یا یک پروژه چند ساله؟

The purpose of the article is to describe and compare the purchasing process for advanced versus basic logistics services. Further some specific observations are presented from the procurement of advanced third-party logistics services, with respect to service definitions, providers evaluations and contracts. The purchasing process of logistics services will in the future need to be more differentiated due to current business trends. Hence companies must analyse how these new procurement situations will impact on their purchasing processes in order to understand what new resources, routines and competence they need to have in order to purchase logistics services in an effective way.

A changing context and new demands on logistics are driving an ongoing transformation and differentiation of the buying process for logistics services. Logistics services purchased some years ago were usually quite easy to define and the purchase decision was mainly based on the price of the service. Those basic logistics services constitute still the big volume offered and bought, but they are increasingly bought in bundles (van Laarhoven et al., 2000; Andersson, 1997; Sink and Langley, 1997; Berglund, 2000). At the same time, different value adding services and IT services are increasingly included in the bundles of services, which are handled in so-called third-party logistics relationships (Andersson, 1997; van Laarhoven et al., 2000). This development increases the complexity of the purchasing process of logistics. The increasingly more advanced tasks companies are trying to outsource today (e.g. logistics management) are much harder to specify and the companies are also not used to doing this. Van Hoek (2000) argues that there is a need for further research and understanding of purchasing initiatives supporting the establishment of supplementary logistics services. We will in this article discuss the kind of procurement included in the procurement of advanced logistics services. But we will in the discussion also include routine purchases of basic services e.g. by the use of an Internet freight exchange. While the first type of process may take several years to finalise the latter may be only a minutes work. The purpose of the article is to describe and compare the purchasing process for logistics services for companies following either the trend towards outsourcing of more advanced logistics services, which will be emphasised here, or the trend towards leveraging the internet as a tool in their buying of basic services. Further lessons learned from especially the procurement of advanced third-party logistics will be shared. The article is conceptual in its nature, but based on empirical material that has been collected over several years of contacts with shippers, both in research projects and variants of action research. The article takes its starting point in the characteristics of service procurement and the business trends influencing logistics. Thereafter two emerging market areas are illustrated and, based on this, a comparison of different types of purchasing processes is made. This results in the identification of three important phases in the purchasing process, which are discussed in greater detail.

In the future the purchasing process of logistics services will be more differentiated due to current business trends. While most previous logistics services could be characterised as “leverage” or “non-critical” items, we will in the future get a more even distribution of the services over Kraljic's portfolio matrix. While many deals will be made as today, maybe in new markets or with changed power relations, some services will be purchased on web-based spot markets. If a company increases the use of freight exchanges, this will lead to a faster, but more repetitive, purchasing process. Further this demands a simplification of the service bought, as standardised and well-defined services are what most easily can be exchanged on an electronic market place. When looking at the opposite type of procurement situation, the purchase of third-party logistics services, the challenges are big. It requires more efforts and there will be a need for purchasers to develop new skills in order to handle these deals effectively. Today these purchasing processes may take years for shippers and providers to jointly develop and contract, so there is great potential for reducing the length of the processes when companies get more used to this kind of procurement. One major challenge is the service definition, which causes problems in several steps of the purchasing process. First, the logistics service as such is often very unclear for both partners; it might just be a vision in the buyers mind. Both scope and type of service must hence be defined—but not to the degree that it delimits the providers degree of freedom to find pioneering solutions. Another issue is that there might only be very few, or even none, providers available to deliver the service requested. It might instead be an issue of developing providers based on some capability they have. This points further to the problem of defining a RfP that is understandable but not too restricting, and also useful for evaluation. Finally, the negotiation process will be long due to all the uncertainty, a lot of service construction that must jointly be completed, developing a contract that could act as an incentive for further development and sharing risks and rewards. All in all, this type of purchasing process will be a long project with new demands on both buyers and providers. It has also been shown that the purchasing process for advanced logistics services may not always be characterised as linear with distinctive steps. Hence companies must analyse how the new procurement situations will impact their purchasing processes and understand where they have to obtain new resources, routines and competence.