How can we measure and evaluate transportation performance? - A case study at ICA South-West

Abstract

Transportation continues to be an important part of business operations, where efficient transportation is used as a competitive advantage, to reduce costs and to facilitate service quality. In this context, measuring and evaluating transportation performance is an essential aspect of ensuring that goal targets and certain levels of performance are achieved. Frameworks for assessing transportation performance can however be complex and multilateral, where risk of both under and- over evaluating exist. Finding more united frameworks for assessing transportation performance is therefore of major interest for both businesses and actors involved in the transportation process. The purpose of this study is therefore to develop and test a conceptual model with metric areas for assessing transportation performance, to evaluate the model's applicability as a framework for transportation performance assessment, but also to assess the transportation performance of the studied case. The model is applied to the case study ICA South-West as an example for evaluating transportation performance. This study is made through action research, where the researcher has had an active role within the studied case. This study utilizes qualitative semi structured interviews and quantitative transportation data processing to gather empirical data. The study highlights how ICA South-West performs well within three out of five key performance indicators for transportation performance assessment. The study further recognizes different areas of operational transportation improvement, but also suggested revisions to current routines for measuring and assessing transportation performance at the company. Furthermore, the aspect of the reverse transportation flow is acknowledged as a potential additional metric area to the conceptual model. The study suggests how a revised conceptual model including the metric area of the reverse transportation flow yields a balanced framework approach for transportation performance assessment. The study also concludes how the concept of measuring and assessing transportation performance is a complex and overlapping process, involving many different measurements and metric areas more connected than separated from each other. This study enables further research on the subject area, where among many suggestions, the developed conceptual model in this study could be applied and tested on other case studies.