Customers' logistics service requirements and logistics strategies in the Swedish sawmill industry

Sammanfattning: The future of the sawmill industry is uncertain; this is partly due to its internal structural changes, but also due to structural changes amongst their customers. Concurrently, competition within the industry is increasing, and therefore focus is constantly being placed on reducing costs and leveraging economies of scale. However, in order for sawmills to benefit from economies of scale, it is necessary to work with a well thought-out logistics strategy. This doctoral dissertation aims at identifying and describing the customers' logistics service requirements as well as describing and analyzing logistic strategies in the sawmill industry.The dissertation identifies and defines some of the sawmills customers' logistics service requirements and establishes a theoretical framework for logistics strategies, as well as it studies logistics strategies in the sawmill industry.House-builders and traditional retailers appear to focus on similar logistics service requirements, whereas the logistics service requirement of the DIY multiple retailers differ. Furthermore, this dissertation provides a general definition of logistics strategy that has been operationalized by generic logistics strategies. The sawmill industry makes use of generic logistics strategies such as differentiation and postponement. The individual sawmills ought to consider improving their process performance by implementing additional generic logistics strategies as well as increasing their utilization of generic logistics strategies that are already implemented.The sawmill industry's utilization of generic logistics strategies is however restricted by its own supplier market (including uncertainties of quality of incoming material), and also by the inherent nature of commodity products, as well as divergent material flows.