Integrated scheduling of warehouse and transportation: how?

Many researchers work hard to help in improving both the supply chain and the logistics performance. However, few of them consider the advantages that may be gained from a better coordination between warehouses and transportation services providers. The use of advanced information and communication technologies (ICT) provides new opportunities to improve efficiency and effectiveness in the management of the supply chain. However new approaches to integrated operations management able to take advantage of these technologies must be devised. This paper suggests three practical approaches that may be helpful to this coordination, discusses the difficulties that must be found when trying to implement those approaches, suggests strategies to be used and proposes a model that may be useful to overcome part of the difficulties.