Logistics service providers’ performance measurement: Insights for improvement

After a period of growing logistics service outsourcing, recently there has been a progressive insourcing of transportation and storage tasks. This resulted in an increase in the competition among Logistics Service Providers (LSPs), which requires a careful performance measurement in order to consolidate their position in the logistics market. However, the literature on such a topic does not pay appropriate attention to how LSPs actually monitor their performance and to the degree of support that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools can give to the measurement process. In this work a survey is completed to investigate the performance indicators used by LSPs as well as how Software Developers’ (SDs) applications support their measurement. A comparison between the metrics adopted by LSPs and those proposed by SDs is carried out by means of a logistics performance measurement model well known in literature.