Inter-firm Collaborative Logistics: Literature Review in the Forest Sector

Harvesting and transportation activities represent a large part of forest companies’ costs. With distances separating forests to mills increasing with time, companies must find new ways to improve their logistics activities and doing so, reduce their costs and CO2 emissions. The literature review conducted in this article showed that collaboration is a very efficient way to reduce expenses, especially with wood bartering, transport consolidation, backhauling and logistics platforms for sorting, consolidating, and warehousing. Although studies showed that collaboration can generate major financial and environmental benefits, only a few examples of successful partnerships exist. This article thus highlights methods which have the potential to support collaborative logistics in the forest sector, while identifying the lack of documented partnerships examples in the literature.