The Rise of the On-Demand Warehousing: Is the Greek Market Ready for This Change?

摘要

The necessity for creating flexible and agile supply chains and adapt on the continuously changing and quite competitive e-commerce logistics market, has made warehousing a strategically critical component of the supply chains. In response to that, new logistics concepts such as on-demand logistics and shared warehousing popped up recently, which with the help of the emarketplaces offer innovative logistics solutions through a single access point and support the logistics actors to: easily optimize the capacity of their warehouse, avoid the fixed costs of owning a warehouse; implement short-term supply chain planning and finally come closer to the end-customer. Although several on-demand warehousing practices can be seen worldwide, the Greek economic crisis delayed until recently the emergence of such trends so, little is known on how the Greek market would respond to such changes. In response to that, this paper introduces briefly the first on-demand warehousing platform to be operating in Greece and closes the knowledge gap on the Greek market's response following a three-step methodological process: conducting a dedicated questionnaire survey circulated to different types of businesses, arranging logistics expert groups and carrying out extensive desktop research. The paper shows that the Greek stakeholders are quite familiar to shared warehousing solutions and they are open to digital changes such as using an on-demand warehousing platform. However, they are less willing to apply such innovations to their daily business. Therefore, specific platform requirements for increasing the attractiveness of such tools to the Greek market are also highlighted.