Transport Service Purchasing for Environmental Performance in the Food Industry Relational Tensions in a Cold Chain Transport Service Triad

Sammanfattning

Despite the growing importance of sustainability in supply chains, environmental criteria infreight transport purchasing often fail to translate from the procurement contracts into dailyoperations. This thesis investigates the reasons for the gap and its persistence in freighttransport procurement by analyzing transport purchasing through the transport service triad –a network consisting of a shipper, a logistics service provider and the shipper's customer. Theempirical setting is a single embedded case study in a food cold chain with the actors beingSkånemejerier (shipper), Tommy Nordbergh Åkeri (carrier/LSP) and ICA (retailer). Thestudy is based on four semi-structured interviews with the three actors (137 minutes), alongwith company sustainability reports. Relational interface theory and paradox theory are usedin the analysis to gain understanding of the interaction between the environmental ambitionsand the operational logistics requirements. The findings show that the shipper-LSP relationoperates at a translational interface characterized by shared fuel infrastructure and an opencost dialogue, partly enabled by the shipper's experience of operating its own fleet. Theshipper-retailer relation on the other hand remains driven by specifications, as the DeliveredDuty Paid (DDP) terms give authority to the retailer over delivery terms but shiftsresponsibility for the transport execution onto the shipper – restricting the knowledgeexchange about how delivery specifications (e.g. time windows and ordering patterns) impacttransport efficiency and emissions. Finally, showing that tensions which start at the retailerinterface where DDP terms sustain an awareness gap, ripple across the triad. As aconsequence the shipper-retailer relationship sets limits on what the shipper and LSP canultimately achieve together