Running an Urban Consolidation Centre: Binnenstadservice 10 Years Back and Forth

Urban consolidation centres (UCCs) have been discussed over many years in city logistics literature. The amount of successful UCCs in the long-run were, and are, very scarce, though. Little is published on the practical issues and experiences of actually running a UCC and offering UCC-services. In the Netherlands, Binnenstadservice (BSS) runs UCCs and UCC services for over a decade now. This contribution discusses development and the experiences of running a UCC in practice in the form of seven lessons, including the evolvement of the business model and organisation model, as well as the development from offering ‘only’ the cross-dock of physical flows, to that of the full triple cross-dock, including financial and information flows. Next, UCCs can be the answer to future challenges, such as zero emission city logistics and fit perfectly in the Physical Internet vision.