Third-party logistics efficiency: an innovative two-stage DEA analysis of the French market

ABSTRACT

During the last decade, Third-Party Logistics (3PLs) became a key component of industrial organisations and, consequently, of their performance. This article provides an analysis of the productive performance and the determinants of efficiency of a sample of 132 firms (3PLs) in 2016. Our study is the first one on the French market (as part of the European market) and on such a large and recent sample. An innovative second stage analysis is then performed. It identifies the determinants of the benchmark status and that of returns-to-scale in addition to the traditional efficiency scores determinants. The results show very low and heterogeneous efficiency levels. Most 3PLs exhibit increasing returns-to-scale, which explains the current merging trend in this industry. Specialisation is preferable to diversification. Finally, only some of the numerous 3PLs certifications improve efficiency.

KEYWORDS:

• Logistics services
• 3PLs
• efficiency
• two-stage DEA
• Tobit regression
• logit regression

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note that 3PLs must be distinguished from 4PLs providers which are supply chain integrators without dedicated physical assets. 4PLs assemble and manage resources, skills and complex technologies with other complementary networked services – often supplied by 3PLs – to offer a coherent logistics solution (Bade and Mueller 1999; Saglietto and Cezanne 2015). A 3PLs provider is, therefore, a company that directly supplies one or more logistics services to its customers whereas 4PL providers are companies which coordinate several logistics services from various independent providers involved in the supply chain (Zacharia, Sanders, and Nix 2011).

2 Note that these data are based only on firms which voluntarily disclose this information.

3 Missing data: Turnover (Bouché, Dialog, Groupe Star’s service, Ingram Micro), turnover & number of employees (GEFCO, Groupe Mauffrey, Groupe Verlhac), number of employees (DB Schenker, Express Courses Services, Olano Services), warehouses area (GT logistics), no French market data (DeRijke, Katoen Natie, Kloosterboer, Toyota Tsusho Europe, UPS Supply Chain Solutions), number of warehouses & number of employees (Delquignies Logistiques), no data (Interlog).

4 See Charnes, Cooper, and Rhodes (1978) for the seminal presentation of the CRS model and Banker, Charnes, and Cooper (1984) for that of the VRS model.

5 Note that the number of vehicles was missing for 13 DMUs.

6 ADEME : Agence De l’Environnement et de la Maîtrise de l’Energie – French environment and energy control agency.

7 Principal Component Analysis was initially proposed by Pearson (1901) and later developed by Hotelling (1933).

8 Groupement Astre is a grouping of companies and has consequently inputs larger than any single company. STVA is a company specialised in the transportation of cars for which warehouse areas are atypical, as it is not possible to vertically store cars.

9 INSEE: Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques. French Bureau of Statistics.