Home-Delivery-Oriented Agri-Food Supply Chain Alliance: Framework, Management Strategies, and Cooperation Stability Control

Chunyang Han, Amjad Pervez, Jingqiong Wu, Xiaojing Shen and Dezhi Zhang
Additional contact information
Chunyang Han: School of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410075, China
Amjad Pervez: School of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410075, China
Jingqiong Wu: Faculty of Transportation Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming 650500, China
Xiaojing Shen: School of Logistics Management and Engineering, Nanning Normal University, Nanning 530001, China
Dezhi Zhang: School of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410075, China

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 16, 1-34

Abstract: The high cost of operation and severe competition in the agri-food e-commerce market make it hard for the small and medium agri-food enterprises (A-SMEs) to operate cost-efficiently and in a sustainable manner. This paper seeks to organize A-SMEs to develop a cooperative organization via collaborative strategies and alliance structures, named as the home-delivery-oriented agri-food supply chain (HASC) alliance, to form a substantive relationship to gain a stable foothold in the emerging e-commerce market. A theoretical framework of the HASC alliance is built with its organizational structure and schematics of the process of implementation strategies that cover the aspects of last-mile chain extension, food transportation, and production/distribution control. Furthermore, a three-step analytical method is proposed to analyze the performance of the alliance with the aim to provide appropriate strategies to hedge against the potential risks of cooperation instability. A hypothetical case is conducted, and the results show that: (1) the performance of the hypothetical HASC alliance with time shows significant variation in the beginning, but it gains stability with the application of stability control strategies; (2) the cooperation stability of HASC alliance is very sensitive to the performance of the strategies that control the customer and environment variations; (3) the factors of trust and market fluctuation have higher effects on membership and environmental stability, respectively; (4) the minimum and maximum cost ranges of control strategies at which the alliance can maintain its stability and performance are 5% and 29%, respectively, of the total operation cost.

Keywords: agri-food e-commerce; strategic alliance; supply chain extension; Multi-temperature Joint Distribution (MTJD); hybrid push-pull strategy; cooperation stability control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6547/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6547/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:16:p:6547-:d:398441

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().