Grocery retailing can be recognized as a market with high competitive pressures which requires a focus on the customers and operational efficiencies to stay competitive. Distribution centers play a vital role in grocery retailing since they constitute a significant part of the total cost of logistics. To reach an overall profitability in a company, an effective and efficient distribution is needed. Grocery retailing and distribution challenges has been discussed previously in literature for compact countries whereas a limited focus has been on elongated countries. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate challenges within a grocery retailing distribution operating in an elongated country with numerous sparsely populated areas located far away from the distribution centers. Thus, this thesis aims to contribute to literature considering the detected research gap. This study is developed with an inductive research approach, which aims to generate meanings from the semi-structured interviews in order to identify challenges within a grocery retail distribution to develop theory and generalized conclusions. Furthermore, the thesis follows a qualitative research direction where a single case study has been conducted. Analyzing and comparing the findings revealed 15 challenges in a grocery retail distribution. The main challenge found during this research was the insufficient filling rate of the pallets and trucks when transporting products between distribution centers and the last mile delivery. Furthermore, 9 possibilities to address the challenges with an overall goal of reducing the total cost of logistics was detected for this research.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hj-39930 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Karlsson, Lisa Caroline, Sørgård, Iris |
| Publisher | Internationella Handelshögskolan, Högskolan i Jönköping, IHH, Centre of Logistics and Supply Chain Management (CeLS), Internationella Handelshögskolan, Högskolan i Jönköping, IHH, Centre of Logistics and Supply Chain Management (CeLS) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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