The growth of e-commerce has increased the number of home deliveries that need to be made in retail operations. Strategies such as reducing routing distance using optimisation models have been the most popular approaches to enhancing the efficiency of the delivery process and reducing its environmental burden. However, recently, customer purchasing behaviour has become relevant in understanding demand trends and increasing the effectiveness of the supply chain process. Customers are subject to different incentives to drive them to wait longer for their home deliveries. These incentives allow companies to pool and ship in more cost-efficient and energy-friendly alternatives. In this article, we present a methodology that uses a mixed-integer-linear programming model to evaluate the impact of extending delivery slots. We use real data from one of the largest retail companies in Mexico to analyse the impact of different time slot extensions for three different criteria: distance, transport costs and CO2 emissions. Our results show that the common approach of minimising distance is not recommended for any of the scenarios under study. On average, having up to 4 days for deliveries leads to savings of 57% in total distance, 61% in total costs and 56% in fuel consumption and/or CO2 emissions.

Purpose: For the past 20 years, Latin American countries have gone from being a low-cost region to significant players in the world economy, with five of its countries ranked among the world’s 50th largest by gross domestic product. This paper aims to study the contribution of Latin American researchers in the field of supply chain management (SCM) to aid an understanding of the Latin American impact within global supply chains (SCs).Design/methodology/approach: The authors present a study which includes a bibliometric analysis of the papers authored by Latin American researchers in the SCM field and which were exclusively published in journals included in the Journal Citation Reports. In addition, the authors conducted a survey to Latin American researchers and consultants to gain greater understanding of the main difficulties, which in their opinion, have negatively affected the SCM area in Latin America within the past five years, and identify possible misalignment between Latin American research and the challenges for SC in the region.Findings: The results show that Latin American research on SCM in the past nine years is not significant for the field considering the number of papers, citations and the papers published in top journals. Another interesting finding is the lack of collaboration among researchers from different Latin American countries, as well as with corporate. Finally, survey results reveal significant differences regarding the main difficulties each country perceived as relevant.Practical implications: Comparing results from both analyses, relevant misalignments stand out between published research and the main difficulties detected. These suggest a challenging opportunity for Latin America, emphasizing the need to increase research contribution of the scientific community, through collaboration and alignment toward overcoming the most troublesome difficulties for Latin America. Therefore, the authors suggest future regional research directions which could also help global companies to tackle the challenges faced and optimize performance of their Latin American SCs.Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous research on the quality and impact of Latin American research in SCM has been conducted. Also, misalignments between researchers and practitioners in the region, which allow identifying weaknesses of Latin American SCs, have not been studied before.