Special issue on supply chain management and collaborative logistics

Supply chain management (SCM) can be viewed as the management or coordination of a network of interconnected business and their activities to support suppliers, producers, transporters, and end users in order to create net value or profit. The area of SCM has had a major contribution to the improvement of profitability and competitiveness in many companies. Operational research (OR) plays an important role in this development, which is the result of new information and decision-making technologies. There is an increased interest in collaboration among companies and their supply chains because it makes a company more competitive, profitable, and efficient. Such collaboration can be any coordinated effort between two or several partners to achieve a common goal. The collaboration can be between partners within the same company who are responsible for different parts of the supply chain or between partners from different companies. This development has been made possible by new information and decision technology where OR plays an important role. An essential element is the necessity of developing more advanced mechanisms capable of guaranteeing several aspects including efficiency, fairness, and openness. This special issue on SCM and collaborative logistics includes seven papers. Five were submitted directly to the call for the special issue. The remaining two papers were included to complete this issue as they fit well within this research area. A short description of the papers is as follows. In order to beat the competition, access new markets, and respect constraints—operational, social and environmental—enterprises establish collaborations with many other business entities. However, each enterprise has its own objectives and planning decisions to meet these objectives. The paper by Audy et al. gives an overview and classification of different forms of logistics collaborations. The authors propose a framework consisting of five generic coordination mechanisms. Each mechanism supports information sharing, the planning and execution of logistics activities, and the benefit sharing. These mechanisms aid managers in designing their collaboration schemes. In this article, a number of industrial case studies with various supply chains are analyzed related to the proposed coordination mechanisms. Osorio and Toro describe and propose a mixed integer programming model to a Colombian cash supply chain. The model includes how to transport and keep cash inventories at offices. Several