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The topic of collaboration in logistics has been thoroughly studied and widely discussed by both scholars and practitioners. Among the possible forms of collaboration, horizontal collaboration is still a neglected area and the related literature is still in its infancy. The review of the available literature has indicated that the current studies of LHC mainly centre on the following issues.
● Factors that are driving or prohibiting LHC
● Development framework
● Case study of a specific practice
● Governance mechanism
First of all, many earlier studies have discussed the benefits and barriers of implementing LHC. This is perhaps a routine logic to start with a research on a new business concept. Given the limited understandings of LHC, one appropriate way to start is by exploring the related opportunities and the associated challenges of implementing this new collaboration concept. Hence, a lot of discussions were made to reveal the benefits and barriers of LHC, in terms of either the theoretical or empirical context.
On the other hand, many recent studies have focused on proposing the development framework for LHC. These frameworks suggested that collaboration development can be an incremental process or based upon the level of planning and trust. However, most of these frameworks are very generally presented and conceptually-driven, and lack of empirical evidence to support their development and application. For instance, frameworks proposed in (Pomponi et al. 2013, Pomponi et al. 2015) and (Moutaoukil et al. 2012) were formulated based on the literature review.
There are also a number of case studies conducted. However, these studies focused on specific forms of collaboration (e.g. joint transportation) or investigated a particular industry sector (e.g. the furniture industry), which did not provide a comprehensive analysis of the possible alternative collaboration in practice.
Several other studies also investigated the social issues such as how trust or conflicts can affect the collaboration, and studied the relevant governance mechanisms to deal with them. These contributions are primarily theoretical which might not support the practical development of the LHC project, however.
In summary, through the surveying of the existing contributions the study has been able to identify two important gaps in the current body of knowledge regarding LHC.
First of all, past studies of LHC have predominant focuses on the driving/prohibiting factors and the development frameworks. There are some common limitations among these contributions:
● Many studies tended to analyse LHC primarily from the theoretical standpoint and a lot of discussions were conceptual based on the literature without the empirical evidence to support.
● Some studies have proposed elements and factors to analyse LHC, but miss to explain their relevance to the LHC development and practice from an operational perspective. For instance, the elements such as trust (Pomponi et al. 2015), conflicts (Wallenburg and Raue,2011), and commitments (Schmoltzi and Wallenburg, 2012) are very general aspects of issues in inter-organizational management. These issues are, however, not the central aspects of logistics and transport operations.
● There is limited investigation on the forms and strategies of LHC. Although some studies have mentioned the related LHC concepts and strategies, their discussions are not systematic and are often simplistic as aforementioned. Further in-depth examinations cannot be found. This reveals the limited understanding on the operational management of LHC in current contributions.
Consequently, it can be argued that in current literature rare studies seriously explore the different types of LHC in practice. Seldom the studies have analysed LHC based on the operational perspective. “How to design and run the LHC?” This is a very key and practical question which is still not clear enough in the current contributions. Therefore, a more thorough investigation is required into the different types of LHC in the practical world. Such study will help systematically classify and illustrate the various forms and properties of collaboration, and consequently contribute to the better design and implementation of LHC in concrete terms.
Also, prior research in the field of LHC has generally adopted empirical methods and tended to analyse horizontal collaboration from the qualitative perspective, such as culture, opportunities and impediments. In contrast, there is little research that systematically and rigorously examines the impact of horizontal collaboration on participants’ supply chain operations, such as capacity utilization and order fulfilment.Many questions remain to be answered. For example, will companies fulfil customer orders better if they join an LHC network? Will participating in horizontal collaboration have a positive or negative impact on the participants’ logistics cost and service level? Will it be beneficial to participate in horizontal collaboration? How significant the benefits are? Will the benefits of joining horizontal collaboration be different for different participants? Hence, there are problems in quantifying the actual effects of horizontal collaboration in the logistics supply system which constitutes a major barrier for the further development of this body of knowledge. In order to assess the impact of collaboration and to understand better horizontal collaboration in action over time, the explicit modelling and representation of the collaboration partners and their behaviours is required.
Hence, to fill the two important research gaps in respect to LHC identified above,three specific research questions have been developed:
(1) What are the key elements to be considered for developing logistics horizontal collaboration?
(2) How can logistics horizontal collaboration networks be classified?
(3) How will partners behave and interact in the logistics collaborative network and how might this have an effect on the individuals, as well as the logistics system as a whole?