The Effect of a Third-Party Facilitator on Supply Chain Collaboration : Evidence from a Dutch Supply Chain Network

Effective collaboration among supply chain actors can lead to improved market access, reduced logistics costs and improved customer service. In practice, however, widespread collaboration initiatives are challenging to implement, due to barriers such as the sharing of sensitive information, coordination complexity, and the lack of trust and operational visibility. The impact of such barriers may be mitigated by a third-party facilitator – an organization that facilitates coordination between actors, negotiates execution-level details, and safeguards sensitive information. We assess the impact of such a facilitator on supply chain collaboration. We further investigate whether such a facilitator may induce a positive, second-order effect on environmental impact and logistics costs through improving collaboration. We test our hypotheses using survey interviews and multiple case studies on member organizations of Connekt, a non-profit logistics facilitator. Our results suggest that the existence of a third-party facilitator in supply chains increases the number of collaborations. We also find evidence that collaboration leads to reduction of supply chain costs and partial support that collaboration is associated with positive environmental impact. Overall, our study sheds light on the role of a third-party facilitator in supply chain collaboration, its contribution to reducing supply chain costs, and improving the associated environmental footprint.(Online Appendix: http://ssrn.com/abstract=4284668)