An Empirical Study On Alliance Capacity Of Third-party Logistics Enterprises

With the third-party logistics development and changes in practice, the salient features is that logistics service has developed from individual logistics stage to the to alliance logistics stage.In order to gain more competitive advantage, logistics enterprise usually form a alliance to serve particular customers in a certain period of time. Thus they can share logistics resources to achieve better results than individual logistics activities. The formation of partnership relation between third-party logistics enterprises can produce mutual trust and share risks and revenue. In addition, the ralation can promote the advantage of each other in logistics services, as well as the bi-directional or multi-directional flow of logistics service elements, thus can reach the maximize effectiveness of alliance. This is also our direction of development of logistics enterprises at present and in the future. In previous research, scholars usually research third-party logistics enterprises vertical alliances from the perspective of value chain of logistics service customer and providers. In addition, scholars also focus on the stability, alliance partner selection and trus from the bilateral level. Few literature has researched third-party logistics enterprises horizontal alliances from the perspective of alliance management capabilities.Based on the above background, this paper first describes the theoretical study and practical status related to third-party logistics alliances in domestic and international, and discusses the necessity to study management capabilities of third-party logistics in horizontal alliances. Secondly, based on expounding the theory of dynamic capabilities, this paper analyses the relationship between dynamic capabilities and alliance capability, and further definitudes that alliance capability is a form of dynamic capabilities which, and this paper researchs third-party logistics enterprises alliance capability from this perspective. Thirdly, according to the dynamic capabilities theory framework, based on routine and mechanism process, this paper determines that the third-party logistics alliance capability consists of alliance portfolio operational capability, single alliance operational capacity, learning capacity and coordination capacity. Then an assumption model of third-party logistics enterprises alliance capability is built. Finally, this paper uses empirical analysis to test the theoretical assumptions. The results show that the model of alliance capability built in this paper is rational.This study provides a theoretical basis and practical guidance for the development and enhance of third-party logistics enterprises alliance management capacity in China.