Redesign of transfer capabilities : studies in container shipping services

Abstract

Traditionally transportation and materials handling services have been organized along the transport modes, but today the logistics service concepts address more directly the needs of typical customers and the efficiency of the whole integrated transportation chain. We have witnessed during the last thirty years the introduction of international parcel services, intermodalism and lines of huge container ships, value added services provided by third parties, and mega carriers integrating local and regional postal and private cargo services in land, sea and air. In the context of supply chain management, transfer capabilities mean the collective abilities of the industry to provide cargo handling, warehousing and transportation services dealing with the economies of scale and scope of routes, facilities and organizations, and the costs of actually serving customer. Despite the prevalence of integrated multimodal services in practice there are no matching theoretical models of general transfer capabilities available for the analysis of the logistics services sector.

Recognizing the tremendous change taking place in the transportation sector through globalization, deregulation, telecommunication and standardization, this thesis is targeting novel conceptual and operational approaches in the development of transfer capabilities and service solutions and to find generalized principles for strategic level structures and efficient operation to be applied over the entire physical transfer chain. The normative framework developed for the classification and analysis of physical transfer capabilities defines different types of transport and materials handling needs and business organizations that provide the delivery channels for the transfer services. By describing the long term changes of transfer services and the associated public and market institutions, an efficient matching of different transfer capabilities with various existing and new types of channel organizations can be determined in general, and with particular concern for the technological and organizational innovations in container shipping which is used as a test environment. The investigation involves in addition to sea transportation and port operations also the land transportation phases and terminal handling in the container transportation chain. Advanced solutions and operational practices are searched by examining the organizational models with strong emphasis on the role of standardization and cargo handling, transportation and information technology as well as the redesign of the technological and organizational interfaces. The influence of economic development trends and globalization to transfer services is reviewed.

The first contribution of the thesis is a new conceptual framework Transfer Service Matrix (TSM) for classifying different transportation and material handling needs and types of organizational channels to position current practices and to visualize future development of transfer services. The second contribution comes from the use and testing of the TSM for analysis and illustration of potential structures for container transfer in case studies of operational and technological development in ports, where interviews and practical investigations are also supported with mathematical and simulation models. The third contribution is the discussion of the various organizational challenges when implementing networked business models and interlinked transfer chains. The managerial implications deal with the organizational and channel redesign issues required for the conservative industry to really bring the technological and operational process innovations to serve the customers.