MODELLING THE DOCUMENTATION FLOW IN TRANSPORT SUPPLY CHAIN - RESULTS FROM THE SIMULATION EXPERIMENTS

The focal point of interest in the research was directed towards the communications flows within the logistics value chain, since the influence of the electronic commerce technologies has become more and more evident. In order to be able to define the characteristics of the system, these researches were primarily oriented to the analysis of the communications and interorganization links of the transport logistics value chain. However, the technical characteristics of the already existing information technologies have been pointed out in order to determine what is the real value that the electronic commerce technologies have within the transport logistics value chain. Simulation has been used to define economic behavior of the model and its entities for two generic case studies - usage of the electronic and paper documents. The only difference in the models are different times to perform the activity. The results show that electronic documents can decrease the transaction costs Electronic documents diminish the time used to obtain, create the documents, and thus the costs are decreased. For one shipment (total of 103 documents) electronic documents are 39% cheaper, then paper documents.and the difference between the electronic and paper documents is 295.44$ for one set of 103 documents in one shipment. It is interesting result that the dependence of the supply chain network on the government is minimal. Usage of the electronic documents diminishes the importance of the government further by 73%.