Research into 4PL Resource Sharing Management Platform Based on Horizontal Supply Chain

After years of investigation, the author believes that the bottleneck of third-party logistics (TPL) industry in China is the small and medium TPL enterprises (TPL-SME). In order to solve such problems as low level of informationization, low level of credibility, and low level of intensification which commonly exist in TPL-SME, the author suggests in the paper the construction of 4PL resource sharing management platform, which can serve a number of TPL-SME and establish horizontal supply chain between TPL-SME so that TPL-SME and TPL-SME business branches can form TPL clouds in the Web. And thus TPL-SME can manage at the minimum cost through the platform. Meanwhile, TPL-SME can share their warehousing resources, freight transport resources, and joint distribution. Credit management sharing database of quantificational cloud logistics is established, and cloud computing for optimizing TPL-SME warehousing resources is given, so as to minimize the warehousing costs among all TPL-SME in the platform.