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logistics service providers need to provide highly individual service offerings to their
clients. Within a network of affiliated logistics providers a 4PL selects matching
providers to the needed services and integrates them to meet customer's requirements.
Moreover, a 4PL governs the overall process, optimize it, and acts as prime contractor
for the customer. They are the main contact person, coordinators of the involved
logistics providers, and have the responsibility for the overall process and its quality
of service. To determine the quality of service, the 4PL has to monitor and to measure
the performance of each participating partner. Fig. 1 illustrates a 4PL's service
lifecycle which consists of the phases: analysis, design, implementation, operation
and retirement [6]. The lifecycle is outlined in more detail in Section 6.
Fig. 1.
4PL service lifecycle
In this contribution we focus at first on the design phase and, thus, one of the main
activities of a 4PL to be competitive - the multi-step planning process for its
customers. Depending on specific requirements this planning process includes e.g.
process modeling, selecting providers, defining the needed services or building long-
term forecasts in order to assure a viable and robust logistics systems (see Fig. 1).
Although we can accommodate several steps of planning a complete logistics system,
the results of the various steps are still isolated (i.e. we still have to provide same
information in multiple systems). Hence, high costs and an error-prone overall
planning process are the results. Therefore, it is shown in [7] that the integration of
planning steps, especially the further use of process models for developing simulation
models, is essential to avoid this and to reduce the overall time and effort.
Another problem we focus in this paper concerns the data acquisition. Nowadays,
companies are overwhelmed with data. On the one hand, this can lead to a more
robust, and thus, more precise simulation because the available database is bigger
than ever. On the other hand, it is more difficult to select the needed data in the right
quality, quantity and granularity. This flood of data must be processed in a suitable
manner to meet the requirements of the presented 4PL simulation approach.
In this contribution we, therefore, present an approach for integrating simulation in
the overall planning process of a 4PL. Firstly, we discuss the prerequisites and
requirements our planning approach is designed for, followed by an overview of
adjacent approaches and fields of study. Then we show how to build a simulation
model from an already modeled process and service profiles which contain
information concerning the performance of each provider and their offered services.
After that, we present a method on how to deal with the increasing velocity, variety,
value and volume of data and how to analyze and process this data for further use.
Afterwards, we show how to apply this method in order to use the acquired data for
simulation in form of service profiles. And finally we end with a conclusion and
future work of the approach.
