چارچوب چند عاملی برای تدارکات شخص ثالث در تجارت الکترونیک

In an e-commerce environment, the third party logistics (3PL) takes charge of the logistics design, delivery, storage and transportation in a supply chain with its professional and complete value-added services. Beginning with an analysis of the relationships between the 3PL and supply chain members, the authors suggest that only when the 3PL reengineers its logistics business process to accommodate the customer could it maximize the value of the customer. Finally, five intelligent agents, order management agent, logistics process reengineering agent, resource scheduling agent, dynamic union management agent and simulating and evaluating agent are designed to form an e-commerce based 3PL system which, with the collaboration of the five agents, could construct a virtual private logistics teamwork suitable for a certain customer's need and furthermore, realize the win–win between the customer and the logistics service vendor.

The tendency of the global economic development makes the competition of the supply chains be the main and essential one between two individual enterprises. Only when its whole supply chain keeps high competitive could an enterprise survive for a long time. The rapid development of e-commerce makes it possible to integrate and improve the competitive advantages of the whole supply chain because the openness, globalization, low-cost and high-efficiency of e-commerce extend the internal information network of an enterprise and enable the business to business (B2B) e-business activities among several enterprises. The involved enterprises are connected to be a larger and more interactive supply chain network system in which exist four flows, i.e. flow of goods, flow of information, flow of financing and flow of trading. Integration of four flows is one of the characteristics of e-commerce supply chain even though they are running in different velocities. For the velocity of goods flow is far slower than that of other three ones, the goods flow has been the bottleneck of the supply chain. To increase the flow rate of goods, enterprise are looking for more professional logistics service vendors in succession. 3PL is selected in place of the private logistics systems of enterprises to take charge of part or whole of the supply chain logistics for it is informational, professional, networked and systemized. Therefore, the efficiency of the supply chain logistics is determined by the efficiency of the 3PL's logistics service. On the other hand, the logistic customer needs to know more, various information of the logistics since there exists venture of route as well as the ownership of the goods and the goods itself are separated. All of these bring several new requirements both on the 3PL service and on its logistics business process. How can a 3PL provide customized services according to different customer requirements and meanwhile its logistics process could be stable enough for long period of development is the main researching topic of this paper.

The 3PL vendor provides logistics services to the supply chain as an associate object of the later. By building up a private logistics service unit, virtual private logistics subsystem (VPL) with a multi-agent system, a 3PL vendor could integrate its logistics business process with the business process of the supply chain members. Moreover, the logistics flow and the logistics information flow are seamlessly connected with the financing flow and trading flow of the supply chain. The 3PL vendor would keep the stability of its own business process while providing customized services to the supply chain members.