Exploring Crowd Logistics Delivery as a last mile delivery solution : the perspectives of multiple stakeholders

The dramatic rise in online purchasing in the last few years has highlighted the importance of the last mile delivery (LMD) task across the globe. However, it faces many economic, social, and environmental challenges (Triple bottom line). This has led to exploring a variety of solutions to develop an efficient last mile delivery system. Amongst them, one rapidly growing innovative solution is Crowd Logistics Delivery (CLD). CLD is assigning a delivery task to a network of individuals who are not employed by the company, that work flexibly as driver full time or part time to deliver goods from point to point. However, up to now, far too little attention has been paid to understanding the multiple perspectives of stakeholders in developing an efficient CLD system. Thus, this study aims to explore CLD in relation to the perspectives of the different stakeholder groups: institutional: decision makers, industrial: CLD applications owners, logistic service providers' managers, and retailers' owners, and individual: customers and drivers/crowd in a rapidly emerging economy – the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). This study uses an inductive qualitative case study approach which would allow exploration of this new topic and provide more flexibility to understand the impact of social and contextual factors. Furthermore, it can provide information richness and a deep understanding of an evolving phenomenon in real-world settings. Besides, there has been little qualitative analysis of this novel topic. While the findings of this thesis broadly support the work of other studies in this area, it provides new insights that no previous study has offered. Particularly, by exploring its business models, the study shows how CLD is implemented for LMD. This study has identified three different practices of CLD in the context presented by business models: B-to-B-Contract, Bto-C, and C-to-C. It also identified the internal success factors of each business model, including registration, assigning orders, compensation, and the payment model. It further reveals the motivations for stakeholders to use CLD as a last mile delivery solution, such as LMD-related benefits and the social impact on society. In addition, the study has identified the four main challenges CLD faces in last mile delivery that impede its success: legislation, availability of supply/drivers, trust, and culture. These results add to the rapidly expanding field of CLD. By empirically focussing on the impact of different stakeholders based on their saliency to CLD, the study contributes in several ways to the understanding of CLD and provides a basis to improve CLD as a last mile delivery solution, and particularly in the context of an emerging economy. It also provides a comprehensive study to understand different aspects of CLD and the significant role of stakeholders in shaping the nature and destiny of development initiatives. Furthermore, this study extends the theory in the context of CLD and further extends our understanding of the factors that influence CLD through the stakeholders' involvement. It shows that failing to include the key stakeholders will impact on an organisation's success. Therefore, it shed light on the issues that were captured through involving key stakeholders in the study. These issues may result from not involving key stakeholders, including drivers' participation limitations, and customers' adoption of a certain business model. It also helped to differentiate between the various understandings of trust, privacy, security, quality, and handling.