A new transport service has taken off since late 1990 on the freight forwarding market: express distribution services for small consignments of palletised goods. Based on the success of these services in Britain, Belgium and Luxemburg, more and more hauliers whatever the size of them are settling on this emerging market. Basically, they do deliveries of groups of 1 to 6 pallet consignments for the next day or the day after, mostly within France and sometimes beyond. Between 1990 and 2005, the proportion of palletised goods in chapter 9 of the NST/R classification (machinery, transportequipment, etc). has increased from 28% to 44% in terms of tons respectively, and from 11% to 26% for chapter 0 (agricultural products and live animals). Unlike express forwarders which by definition do not ship loads over 500kg, freight forwarders deal with pallets of any weight. It is also notable that express distribution of palletised freight companies have oftenset up information systems for products' tracking and tracing to match their customer's expectations. The present document proposes an interesting insight into this newly appeared branch of the road freight transport Industry. The approach has consisted in reviewing the whole of the consistent literature on this topic, focusing on the various researches and studies that had been undertaken. Moreover, SITRAM and ECHO French databases have been processed and analysed so as to get statistical characteristics of palletised freight flows in France. Interviews were conducted of chosen actors, more specifically: 6 shippers and 5 hauliers who have shared their respective views about this new service. It is noteworthy that professionals tend to work more and more together and put in place collaborative solutions in order to ensure a certain amount of pallet traffic. Specialized organisations owning broad logistics platforms' networks play a key role. With the ever-increasing pressure of economic factors such as the escalation ofgas-oil prices in background, this study examines the emergence of a new service on the logistics services market. This strives to determine to which extent it actually is a development opportunity for hauliers, especially the small- and medium- sized ones which are likely to suffer the most from the gas-oil price crisis. Moreover, this study is intended to be broadly distributed within the French Ministry for Ecology, Sustainable Development and Spatial Planning departments of Transport and Logistics. It responds indeed to the Ministry constant urge to capitalize on evolutions of theroad freight transport sector. For the covering abstract see ITRD E145999
Abstract