Common carriage comprises over one-third of the $600 Billion annual trucking market in the United States (see American Trucking Association 2002). Since the deregulation of interstate trucking in 1980 and the intrastate movements in 1994, the predominate form of commercial relationship between shippers and common carriers has changed from a transactional to a contractual basis. These contracts typically hold for one to two years and sometimes longer. Shippers select which carriers to do business with on each lane (origin-destination pair) utilizing a competitive request-forproposal (RFP) process, which is, in fact, an auction. This paper takes a look at this RFP procurement process for transportation services. While bidding processes have been used to procure many products and services, transportation presents added complexities in terms of strong interdependencies (later referred to as economies of scope), large numbers of unique items, and inaccurate information. Truckload, ocean, air-cargo and most other transportation modes share these complex characteristics -especially interdependent costs. For the sake of brevity, this paper focuses on truckload (TL) transportation but the model can be, and has been, applied to other modes as well.The primary research question addressed in the extended research is: How should shippers procure TL motor carrier transportation services? This paper presents one approach that is both grounded in theory and appears to have worked well in practice.The generic transportation procurement process can be divided into three steps:• Bid Preparation -where the shipper determines what is to be bid out, what carriers to invite, how to present or package the business to be bid, and what opportunities exist for different types of shipper-carrier relationships. 1

Performance measurement in the logistics function, like all business functions, begins at the individual metric level. A performance measurement system that is well designed at the strategic level can be flawed at the individual metric level; the Achilles' Heel of any measurement system. The pressing need is not for the development of novel performance metrics: there is a great abundance of sufficient metrics already in existence. Rather, there is a need for a method with which to evaluate existing metrics. This paper addresses this need by suggesting a set of evaluation criteria for individual logistics performance metrics and identifying the inherent trade‐offs. A taxonomy of logistics performance metrics, organized by process rather than by function, is also presented and the metrics are evaluated using the established criteria.

This paper presents an axiomatic foundation for developing firm-specific scenarios in the tradition of the Intuitive Logics School (ILS), a structured scenario creation process built on that foundation, and its application using a case study. The ILS outlines a high-level scenario-development process, but without a theoretical basis or prescriptions for executing different process steps. The lack of theoretical grounding has led to a proliferation of methods for developing scenarios, without any basis for comparing them. We fill this gap in the literature by articulating a set of axioms characterizing the nature of human knowledge about the business environment and scenarios as depictions of that environment. Using this theoretical foundation, we devise a structured process for developing scenarios. Finally, we demonstrate this process by applying it to develop four scenarios for a firm in the U.S. healthcare sector.

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