Do Suppliers of Third Party Logistics Understand their Customers?

Supply chain management (SCM) research has tended to focus on the planning and management of a broad range of activities involved in sourcing and procurement, conversion, and management of logistics. However, the domain is increasingly recognising the importance of coordination and collaboration between channel partners. As such, there is a need to better understand how channel partners make decisions; and in particular, whether there is an alignment in the expectations of these partners. In this study we use a form of discrete choice analyses to explore the relative importance of various supply chain components for buyers of a third party logistics services. Our research approach overcomes many of the limitations seen in previous studies that rely on simple rankings by survey respondents. The findings suggest that suppliers need to better understand the preference structures of their customers.