Freight Forwarding
Shipment of goods is a complex process 1.
Source: 2019 Business Profile | DPDHL
It takes a lot of effort to deal with the whole process by the shipper. Thus in the 19th century, freight forwarders were born 2.
Freight forwarding is not just taking care of the transportation from origin to destination, e.g., taking over the goods and place it on the trucks and transport it to the destination. It cares about the whole lifecycle of the shipment3 4 5. For example, a freight forwarder dealing with freight capacity, combining shipments from different shippers for better efficiency, providing legal documents, and dealing with payments.
Source: Lai, 2004.
The freight forwarding business has been regulated several times in history 5.
At the end of the 20th century, the internet started to bring in a lot of new ingredients to the freight forwarding business. Internet gets into the view of the freight forwarders as early as 2000 3.
Murphy2001 Murphy PR, Daley JM. Profiling international freight forwarders: an update. Int j phys distrib logist manag. 2001;31: 152–168. doi:10.1108/09600030110389433 ↩︎ ↩︎
Lai2004 Lai K-H, Cheng TCE. A study of the freight forwarding industry in Hong Kong. Int J Logist Res Appl. 2004;7: 71–84. doi:10.1080/1367556042000199011 ↩︎
Pope1985 Pope DJ, Thomchick EA. U.S. Foreign Freight Forwarders and NVOCCs. Transportation Journal. 1985;24: 26–36. Available: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20712815 ↩︎ ↩︎
- Murphy2001 Murphy PR, Daley JM. Profiling international freight forwarders: an update. Int j phys distrib logist manag. 2001;31: 152–168. doi:10.1108/09600030110389433
- Lai2004 Lai K-H, Cheng TCE. A study of the freight forwarding industry in Hong Kong. Int J Logist Res Appl. 2004;7: 71–84. doi:10.1080/1367556042000199011
- Pope1985 Pope DJ, Thomchick EA. U.S. Foreign Freight Forwarders and NVOCCs. Transportation Journal. 1985;24: 26–36. Available: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20712815
- ff_wikipedia Freight Forwarder | Wikipedia
- dpdhl_business_prof 2019 Business Profile | DPDHL
L M (2021). 'Freight Forwarding', The Flow, 05 April. Available at: https://flow.leima.is/road-freight/topics/freight-forwarding/.