Digital Reconfiguration of Matching Practices in Platform-Based Logistics Enterprises: A Routine Perspective

Abstract

In low-frequency, high-risk business-to-business (B2B) platform logistics, the matching of transportation resources with customer demand relies heavily on the experiential judgment of operational personnel. While such reliance ensures flexibility, it also poses challenges, including difficulties in information integration, high cross-departmental coordination costs, and limited traceability of decision-making processes. Existing studies have primarily examined the formation mechanisms of organizational routines or the effects of digitalization on organizational action patterns. However, there is a lack of systematic analysis of how digital systems gradually embed into experience-dependent B2B logistics matching, reconfiguring specific workflows and collaboration practices. Adopting an organizational routines perspective, this study conducts a single-case study of a maritime petrochemical logistics platform. It examines how the progressive embedding of a digital system reconfigures matching practices by integrating dispersed information, generating system-generated plans, and establishing a shared informational basis. This process reshapes the sequence of actions, the locus of judgment, and collaboration modes, stabilizing experiential judgment while enhancing traceability and transmissibility. The findings provide an empirical account of the intervention path of digital technology in experience-dependent platform logistics, offering insights for digital transformation in comparable operational contexts.