Towards a classification of Fourth Party Logistics (4PL)

Over just a few years, the outsourcing of logistic functions to various types of logistics services providers (LSPs) has become central to the organization of companies and markets. In this connection, both theorists and practitioners usually present LSPs in terms of classifications, describing their development with the help of representative statistics. However, one may reasonably wonder about the origin of these classifications and the credibility of the statistics, since LSP are not clearly identified in the nomenclatures of economic activities. Then, how to characterize the fourth party logistics (4PL) community? Our aim is to propose a complete analysis of the 4PLs community based on an empirical study on all logistic service providers operating in France. Our methodology consists in the triangulation of information obtained from three studies (based on data contained in the DIANE database, and on data extracted from selected businesses websites).The results we found for the French 4PL community are also representative of the global 4PL, because our methodology is based on three studies which are therefore representative, reproducible and transferable to other countries. We propose a taxonomy and a new definition that differs from the traditional definition of Accenture.