Business models for collaborative planning in transportation: An application to wood products

Abstract

Transportation is an important part of the wood fibre flow chain in forestry. There are often several forest companies operating in the same region and coordination between two or more companies is however rare. Lately, the interest in collaborative transportation planning to support co-ordination has risen since important potential savings have been identified. Even though substantial savings can be realized, it seems that companies' willingness to collaborate is tightly linked to a business model driven by one or many leaders. In this paper, we study a specific business model where one company leads the development of the coalition. The impact of different behaviours of the leading company (i.e. altruistic, opportunistic) is illustrated using an industrial case study of eight forest companies. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.