Future Rail - Collective Organizing in Logistics Networks

A major challenge in the logistics sector concerns how to coordinate the utilization of common resources to create sustainable logistical systems. In such systems many actors must collectively use and mobilize resources that no one single actor alone can control, but which can be collectively used to improve economic efficiency and sustainability. Achieving this, what we call “collective organizing”, entails an improved socio-economic utilization of logistical infrastructures and systems to the benefit of many but where we lack knowledge on the associated problems.

Collective organizing means the configuration of resources and the structuring of activities among multiple heterogeneous actors so as to achieve a level of economic efficiency and sustainability that no one actor can achieve alone. The overarching question that this project address is how we can understand the functioning of this collective organizing in logistics networks.

The purpose is to map the mechanisms impacting on the collective organizing and to explore its strategic effects on actor roles in logistics. The specific aim is to describe, develop and implement a collective organizing tool; the “Interact Scenario Analysis Cluster”(ISAC) in a logistics network of the paper sector.

To this end, ScandFibre Logistics AB, a logistics service provider; BillerudKorsnäs Sweden AB, a logistics solutions customer; Trade Extensions AB, a technology specialist, and Örebro University; a research institution collaborate in a response to the challenges associated with collective organizing. The project centres on the development of ISAC which is based on Trade Extensions trade platform TESS, used to simulate the combinatory matching of heterogeneous transportation capacities with heterogeneous transportation demands in order to increase the efficient use of a pooled resource: the logistics system based on the ScandFibre railway-network.

This research provides new knowledge on the mechanisms that governs the utilization of common pooled resources among heterogeneous actors through a systematic analysis of a logistics network in the paper industry.

The main results of this project are optimized logistics flows and enhanced knowledge of the collective organizing of logistics networks. For the involved companies this project will strengthen their long-term competitiveness and sourcing of knowledge concerning these issues. For the university this research will contribute to the development of the research group “INTERORG” focusing on problems in industrial firms’ inter-organizational flows and enhance the research of the university in relation to the up-coming industrial economics program in civil engineering.