Research objective Case Study 3: Theory-testing research: testing a deterministic relation

6.2.5 Candidate cases

The universe of instances of the object of study to which our theory is applicable consists of all distribution activities of all large retailers that are at least partly located in shopping areas in cities in which time access windows could be installed. In everyday terms, this is the universe of distribution activities undertaken from large retailers’ dis- tribution centres. Obviously there is no comprehensive list of such retailers’ distribution centres or activities worldwide, but it would be possible to construct such an almost complete list of such distribu- tion centres in the Netherlands, particularly in specific branches such as supermarkets, department stores, fashion shops, and specialist shops including pharmacies, which are most common in shopping areas measured in gross floor space and number and size of the ship- ments. We drew up such a tentative list.

6.2.6 Case selection

From this list we selected 14 Dutch retailers that distribute goods from a distribution centre in the Netherlands to shops in the Netherlands. We selected retailers with different competitive strategies: discounters lower end of the market, retailers that focus on cost middle seg- ment of the market, and retailers that focus on response or differen- tiation higher end of the market. Some retailers distribute goods from their distribution centre in the Netherlands to shops located out- side the Netherlands. These shops were excluded, except for three retailers for which it was not possible to separate some foreign shops from Dutch shops in this study, because these shops are interweaved with shops in the Netherlands in one roundtrip or one vehicle during a day. Therefore, we also considered foreign shops in Belgium and Germany for cases 2, 3, and 7. Figure 6.1 shows all considered store locations of the 14 retailers involved in this study. All retailers use a weekly recurring roundtrip planning, except cases 2 and 4 that use a 4-week or a 2-week recurring scheme. For reasons of comparison, for these cases we use the average for one week. Furthermore, in case 4 we included four distribution centres. In this case all shops were supplied from one national distribution centre, but some shops were also supplied from three regional distribution centres. Table 6.1 shows the main case characteristics of the 14 selected retail chains.