Physical Internet-driven last mile delivery: Performance requirements across people, process, and technology

The concept of the physical internet (PI) is changing and reshaping the business environment of logistics along with the cutting-edge technologies and innovations and is rapidly evolving towards last mile delivery (LMD). Implementing new solutions in LMD are particularly essential to meet growing demand, respond to increased operational complexity and enhance efficiency and sustainability. The PI-driven LMD requires new features and capabilities to combat all these challenges. Therefore, there is a need to understand the performance requirements that contextualize the relationships among people, process, and technology (PPT). In this study, a PI-driven LMD framework based on PPT theory is proposed. First, a systematic literature review is conducted to explore the state of the art of academic and practitioner articles and projects on LMD and PI. Then, a thematic analysis is carried out to analyze the requirements of the PI-driven LMD from the perspective of PPT to interpret performance challenges and successes. The main contribution of this study is to investigate the performance related requirements of PI-driven LMD according to PPT perspectives. The findings show that PI-driven LMD improves delivery performance, security, privacy, transparency, and traceability performance as well as customer service performance.