Significance of Criteria and Resulting Significance of Factors Affecting

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

ScienceDirect Procedia Engineering 187 (2017) 513 – 519

10th International Scientific Conference Transbaltica 2017: Transportation Science and Technology

Significance of Criteria and Resulting Significance of Factors Affecting Quality of Services Provided by Lithuanian Road Freight Carriers Ieva Meidutė-Kavaliauskienėa, Dragisa Stanujkicb, Aidas Vasilis Vasiliauskasa,*, Virgilija Vasilienė-Vasiliauskienėa a

Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania b John Naisbitt University, Belgrade, Serbia

Abstract This article is a follow-up to the article published in the TRANSBALTICA 2015: proceedings of the 9th international scientific conference, which was dedicated to the identification of factors that affect quality of services provided by Lithuanian road freight carriers. Authors felt a need to investigate results obtained during the previous research more closely, since demand for transportation services as well as the number of enterprises offering road freight transportation services increases all over the EU. Therefore competition between these enterprises also becomes fiercer. To survive in this highly competitive environment, Lithuanian road freight carriers should ensure their competitive advantage over carriers from other countries. Therefore it is important not only to distinguish factors that predetermine quality of services, but also determine significance of these factors. The purpose of this article is to distinguish criteria that describe quality of services provided by Lithuanian road freight carriers and determine significance of factors affecting those criteria. ©2017 2017The TheAuthors. Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license © Published by Elsevier Ltd. This Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of the 10th International Scientific Conference Transbaltica 2017: (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Transportation and Technology. Peer-review underScience responsibility of the organizing committee of the 10th International Scientific Conference Transbaltica 2017 Keywords: road transport, road freight transport services, quality of transport services, factors affecting quality of transport services, competitiveness

* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected]

1877-7058 © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of the 10th International Scientific Conference Transbaltica 2017

doi:10.1016/j.proeng.2017.04.408

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Ieva Meidutė-Kavaliauskienė et al. / Procedia Engineering 187 (2017) 513 – 519

1. Introduction As it was denoted by Matijošius et al. [1], in course of the growth of the demand for transportation services, the number of enterprises offering these services grows as well. To survive in this highly competitive environment, Lithuanian road freight carriers should take any possible steps to ensure their competitive advantage over carriers from other countries. Upon a surplus of similar or identical services that can be found on the market, the enterprises involved in provision of road freight transportation services should improve quality of their services. In order to increase quality of freight transport services, it is necessary to determine main factors affecting quality of these services, as well as to distinguish which of these factors and to what extent may impact quality of provided services. In this case individual significance of every particular factor and resulting significance of particular set of determined factors is of great interest. The purpose of this paper is to highlight criteria describing quality of road freight transport services and determine significance of factors affecting those criteria. Article begins with the short overview of results presented in paper, published back in 2015, and covers such issues as necessity for Lithuanian road freight carriers ensuring competitive transportation services on the international markets and identification of main criteria of the quality of transportation services. Following chapter is dedicated to determination of the significance of highlighted criteria and resulting significance of factors affecting appointed criteria. In the end of the paper summarizing conclusions are provided. 2. Competitiveness of road freight carriers and quality of road freight transport services Competition, as the main force for the evolution of different organizations, is the main backbone of current economy. Competition appears when there are lot of similar products/services on a given market. The essence of competition lays in the securing or improving of the position of certain enterprise on the market, which can be reached by provision of better products and services than its main competitors. Competition forces every enterprise applying most recent technical developments, engineering and management solutions, as well as implement latest scientific achievements [2]. This leads to suggestion that most successful are those enterprises that are in constant search of innovations, are oriented toward fulfillment of requirements expressed by the customers and are able to defeat conservativism and momentum [3]. This, for sure, can be the case with European road freight transport market. Statistics of European countries reveals that for the majority of EU member states, road transport plays a dominating role on the freight transport market [4, 5]. Ensuring the efficiency of transport sector in general (especially road freight transport sector) is one of the key prerequisites of development of national economies, since this sector is the activity important for tackling the problem of mobility. According to Godlevskaja et al. [6], the concept of benefit of transportation services is oriented towards the circumstance that users have no means for cargo transportation to the point of destination. The key property of provision of a transportation service is that its necessity is ensured by absence or lack of knowledge or available means of the client for accomplishment of transportation process. However, the international road transport market in the EU is large. Laws of majority of Member States provide favorable conditions for development of free transport service market. And since the number of enterprises that offer their transportation services to foreign states is increasing, the competitiveness across the sector grows as well. The appeared access to markets of West Europe countries gingered up the competition between road freight carriers. Additionally, growing costs of provision of transportation services and decrease of the freight on the international markets forces road freight carriers searching for the new ways to ensure their competitiveness. Of course, because of the intense competition on the road freight market, consumers have an opportunity to acquire services of higher quality [7]. Enterprises involved in provision of road freight transport services on the international markets confront abundant competitive challenges. The growing competition is affected by the enterprises already having their segments in the market and by the increasingly growing number of new participants. Therefore, all enterprises involved in provision of similar services on the same market are greatly concerned about their competitiveness. There are a lot of different definitions of competitiveness, but the most useful definition (applied in this paper) sound like this: competitiveness is defined as a totality of various variables, such as technological changes, quality


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and accessibility of services, relevance and efficiency of equipment and facilities, technological development, innovative solutions, information sharing, management solutions and so on [8]. From this follows, that competitiveness is dimension consisting of such factors as quality, price, after sale services and marketing. Competitiveness of an enterprise involved in provision transport services is the most important factor of survival in international market. Competitiveness may be considered a set of factors that affect the position of a transport organization in the competitive struggle. The competitive advantage of provider of certain services depends on the service itself: for daily services, the most important factors are the price and accessibility, whereas for more rarely usable services – the most important factors include exclusive quality of the services, attention to a client and so on [9]. J. Dicova and J. Ondruš [10] emphasize managerial skills of employees of an enterprise as an important competitive advantage. Choice of a proper competitive strategy and creating a competitive advantage depend on complicated analysis of the factors of external and internal environment of organizations [11]. Competitiveness of transport service provider is a complicated set of factors that predetermine in any way a competitive advantage of enterprises in provision of transportation services to a certain extent. The key factors that increase competitiveness of a transport enterprise include: • • • • • • •

price of transportation; security of services; duration of delivery; reliability; opportunities; safety; specialization of services that provides an opportunity to satisfy new or special needs of a client for a higher price agreed with the client.

Also, during the study carried out back in 2014, factors affecting mentioned above criteria were cleared up. Descriptions of the factors are provided in the Table 1. We can see that there are at least several factors that were distinguished by the respondents of the study that might have certain impact on the highlighted criteria. Table 1. Factors affecting the criteria of quality of a transportation service [1]. Criterion Price of transportation

Affecting factor High repair costs Supplemental taxes and laws. Changes of prices of fuel.

Safety

Vehicle tracing. Thefts. Training of drivers. Cargo loading control.

Reliability

Well-timed arrival. Precise and reliable information systems. Great effectiveness of transport managers.

Accessibility of services

Accessibility of different types of vehicles. Effective management of vehicle fleet. Measures for ensuring the effective planning of transportations.

Duration of delivery

Downtime periods. Qualification of drivers. Unknown itineraries.

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However, results of the study conducted by the authors of article – semi structured in depth interviews with heads of several Lithuanian and foreign capital transport organizations – proved that exact freight transportation service quality criteria that really matters are as follows: 1. Price of transportation; 2. Safety; 3. Reliability; 4. Accessibility of services; 5. Duration of delivery [1]. 3. Determination of the significance of criteria and resulting significance of affecting factors Criteria and factors affecting these criteria were assumed to have the same significance. However, if this is not the case, then it is necessary to determine the significance of every particular criteria, as well as the resulting significance of affecting factors. In the literature, many approaches and techniques are proposed for determining the significance of criteria, such as pairwise comparisons [12] and SWARA Technique [13]. However, there should not be ignored approaches that allow determination of the significance based on ratings obtained from one or more experts. Such approaches could be particularly suitable for experts who are not familiar with decision theory and multiple criteria decision making. An approach that allows determination of the significance of criteria, affecting factors, as well as resulting significance of affecting factors on the basis of ratings assigned to the criteria and affecting factors can be shown as follows: Step 1. Determine the significance of criteria. The significance of the criteria Sci should be calculated as follows:

ai , max ai

Sci =

(1)

i

where: ai denotes the arithmetic mean of ratings provided by K experts for criterion i, Sci∈(0.1]. Step 2. Determine the significance of affecting factors. The significance of the affecting factors Saij should be calculated as follows:

Saij =

aij max aij

,

(2)

j

where: aij denotes the arithmetic mean of ratings provided by K experts for affecting factor j of criterion i, Saij∈(0.1]. Step 3. Determine the resulting significance of factors. After that, the resulting significance of each factor Sij should be determined as follows:

Sij =

Sci × Saij max( Sci × Saij )

where Sij∈(0.1].

,

(3)

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4. Numerical illustration In this section a numerical is presented (in order) to present the proposed approach in detail. At the beginning of the evaluation, the team of four experts has been formed. The main criteria that were applied to select these experts were as follows: leading position in the company providing road freight transport services (at least head of the department) and at least 5 years of experience in current position. In the next step, the team of experts has been surveyed regarding their opinions about the importance of the criteria given in Table 1. For evaluation, they have used Likert’s five-point scale. The ratings obtained the team, as well as their arithmetic mean, are shown in Table 2. The significance of criteria calculated by using Eq. (1) is also shown in Table 2. Table 2. The significance of the criteria. Ratings E1

E2

E3

E4

Arithmetic mean

Sci

Price of transportation

4

3

4

3

3.50

0.93

Safety

4

5

3

3

3.75

1.00

Criteria

Reliability

3

4

3

1

2.75

0.73


3

4

3

3

3.25

0.87


3

3

4

3

3.25

0.87

As it can be seen from Table 2, using the proposed approach the most important criterion gets the value 1 while other criteria receive values that lie between 1 and 0. The significance of affecting factors has been determined in a similar way, by using Eq. (2), as shown in Table 3. Table 3. The analysis of the service and the criteria that predetermine its quality as well as the degree of their impact.

E1

E1

E1

Arithmetic mean

Sai

High repair costs

2

1

3

4

2.5

0.5

Supplemental taxes and laws

2

2

1

3

2

0.4

Changes of prices of fuel

4

3

4

4

3.75

0.75

Affecting factors


Safety

Reliability



Ratings E1

Criteria

Vehicle tracing

3

2

4

4

3.25

0.65

Thefts

5

4

5

4

45

0.9

Training of drivers

3

3

4

5

3.75

0.75

Cargo loading control

5

5

5

5

5

1

Well-timed arrival

5

5

5

5

5

1

Precise and reliable information systems

3

4

4

5

4

0.8

Great effectiveness of transport managers

4

5

4

3

4

0.8

Accessibility of different types of vehicles

4

4

3

4

3.75

0.75

Effective management of vehicle fleet

5

5

5

5

5

1

Measures for ensuring the effective planning

4

4

4

5

4.25

0.85

Downtime periods

3

4

4

5

4

0.8

Qualification of drivers

4

3

5

5

4.25

0.85

Unknown itineraries

3

2

4

5

3.5

0.7

Finally, the resulting (overall) significance of affecting factors has been calculated by using Eq. (3), as it is encountered in Table 4.

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Table 4. The resulting significance of affecting factors. Criteria

Sci

Affecting factors

Sai

Sij


0.93

High repair costs

0.50

0.47

Safety

Reliability



1.00

0.73

0.87

0.87

Supplemental taxes and laws

0.40

0.37

Changes of prices of fuel

0.75

0.70

Vehicle tracing

0.65

0.65

Thefts

0.90

0.90

Training of drivers

0.75

0.75

Cargo loading control

1.00

1.00

Well-timed arrival

1.00

0.73

Precise and reliable information systems

0.80

0.59

Great effectiveness of transport managers

0.80

0.59

Accessibility of different types of vehicles

0.75

0.65

Effective management of vehicle fleet

1.00

0.87

Measures for ensuring the effective planning

0.85

0.74

Downtime periods

0.80

0.69

Qualification of drivers

0.85

0.74

Unknown itineraries

0.70

0.61

5. Conclusions Ensuring the efficiency of transport sector is one of the key prerequisites of development of national economy. Since road freight transport plays a dominating role on the European freight transport market, development of quality of services provided by road freight transport carriers is of great importance to the society as a whole and to the carriers themselves, because later ones confront abundant competitive challenges. Competitiveness of organizations is defined as a totality of various variables, such as technological changes, quality and accessibility of services, relevance and efficiency of equipment and facilities, technological development, innovative solutions, information sharing, management solutions and so on. Authors of the article state that most important freight transport service quality criteria identified by Lithuanian road freight carriers are as follows (from most to least important): safety; price of transportation; accessibility of services; duration of delivery; reliability. All these criteria are affected by the vast number of factors that also were identified. The most important result of this article, however, is determination of significance of factors that were revealed as having the strongest impact on the highlighted criteria, and, last but not least, determination of resulting significance of factors. Conclusion can be made that the most important factor which may have an impact on the quality of services, more precisely – safety – is cargo loading control.

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