Benefits of horizontal cooperation in supply chains

This Ph.D. thesis aims at assessing the benefits of horizontal cooperation in logistics and at analyzing how these benefits depend on the markets and partners characteristics. In the past recent years, researchers have presented horizontal cooperation as an efficient and unique way to reduce costs (e.g., transportation, inventory, facility, stock-out) and CO2 emissions. The literature on horizontal cooperation demonstrates a high variation in benefits related to the collaboration, regarding the markets and the partners characteristics as they impact the design of the supply chain network. These benefits are therefore difficult to predict, which can be a significant obstacle for companies considering forming a cooperation. In order to promote horizontal cooperation to companies, it was thus crucial to assess these benefits for each partner. Moreover, while horizontal cooperation has mainly been analyzed at an operational level with transportation decisions in the current literature, the present thesis examines horizontal cooperation at tactical and strategic levels, using location-inventory models to decide the number and location of facilities, the delivery network and the inventory decisions. From different sets of experiments, we present useful insights to companies wishing to collaborate. This Ph.D. thesis also provides valuable tools to select the more favorable partners and to define markets characteristics that should motivate companies to collaborate. Finally, we integrate companies’ individual expectations in our models to understand why some companies leave a collaboration and, therefore, try to improve the long-term stability of collaboration.
(ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2021