Continuous quality improvement in logistics service provisioning

Abstract

Driven by rising competitive constraints companies began to outsource at least parts of their internal activities to specialized external logistics providers in terms of contracts. Thereby, new business models like the fourth party logistics evolved, which acts like coordinator of the emerging logistics networks. The main task of the provider is the planning, monitoring and measurement of the different networks of its customers. Based on a method to integrate process modeling and their simulation, complex event processing to gather real-time information about process executions and service profiles to measure subsequent service providers' quality - a closed loop approach for improving the quality of service provisioning is presented. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.