The future of floriculture logistics

Abstract

Throughout this report a logistic design for the floriculture supply chain from the growers to the buyers of the flower auction is developed to be feasible around the year 2025. Trends and developments in and around the floriculture market as consolidation of transport, shift in customer demand and the Internet of Things are plotted on a hype cycle to test which trends are feasible in this market on the mid-term. This analysis in combination with a relationship analysis results in two solution directions that include a lot of other trends and developments and could be feasible to implement before 2025. Those two solution directions are a virtual storage and a hub-network and are elaborated into conceptual designs. These designs operate on different levels and could be combined for a future logistic design. In this final design, storage hubs and transit hubs will deal with physical products with a focus on storage of goods for just in time delivery and consolidation. The virtual storage is represented in a commercial and transportation platform. On the commercial platform products can be sold at any time and place in the world even if they are not physically located in a storage. The transportation platform will take care of consolidation of product flows and the assignment of transport orders to logistics providers. The combination of those two conceptual designs with inclusion of the described trends is expected to be feasible before 2025, however, the implementation in this complex floriculture market will take a lot of effort and trust from all stakeholders.