Contemporary innovations in freight transportation and logistics are instrumental in achieving more integrated, efficient, and sustainable services in the global market. While much attention is going to how contemporary innovations, including technology-enabled and management innovations, change the supply of services, little work is done on depicting their changing relationship with freight transportation demand. We present findings from a comprehensive study among Global Fortune 500 companies aimed at understanding what drives the demand for modern transportation services. We investigate the importance of three key service attributes that are growing in importance, i.e., operational control of transport mode, service flexibility and ancillary value-added services. We measure the influence of contextual factors on the choice of service, including supply chain strategy, demand volatility, internal flexibility and industry type. This leads to recommendations for shippers on how they can adjust their supply chains in the future to benefit from new freight services. Our findings also stress the need for the logistics industry to adopt modern service choice approaches.

Factors driving the choice of shipper firms for services of logistics service providers have long been recognized in the freight transportation literature. However, the willingness among shippers to choose flexible transportation services, where the service package can be adapted during planning and execution, has received less attention. In particular, little is known about the contextual circumstances under which shippers would be inclined to select such flexible transportation service. In this study, experimental scenarios and discrete choice modeling are used to investigate the willingness among shippers to use flexible transportation services. We estimate multinomial logit, mixed logit, and latent class models for a sample of nearly 200 global shipper firms and calculate willingness-to-pay measures for flexibility. The findings indicate that flexible services are essential in demand-volatile markets. Since logistics services may provide external flexibility for shipper firms, we also study which related internal flexibilities in supply chains drive these choices. In particular, our findings show that it is mainly the volume flexibility of shippers that mediates the choice of flexible transportation services.

Several innovations during the last decades have impacted freight transportation as one of the major drivers of global economic development. Both demand and supply of freight transportation services have been transformed through major recent logistics’ innovations such as globalization dynamics, freight network integration, mass-individualized logistics services, digitalization and advanced transportation technologies. Changes in the service deployment of logistics service providers (LSPs) will ultimately transform characteristics of their logistics service packages resulting in the emergence of new service features for their customers i.e., shipper firms. These new features not only influence business operations of the customer firms directly or indirectly, but also change shipper firms’ expectations in the long run. While a deep understanding of customers’ needs is one of the key factors to sustain competitive advantage of firms, in freight transportation less attention is being paid to understand beforehand whether an innovation is appreciated and will be utilized by customers. The innovations in freight transportation services are offering shippers new choices and service offerings which claim big advantages for shippers. However, no one has yet tried to measure these advantages. This lack of knowledge makes it difficult for LSPs to compose multi-dimensional service packages and to set prices in the market. Fulfilling this practical need requires a major research effort, to formulate and empirically model the demand for these services....

This paper investigates the willingness of shippers to delegate control over the transportation mode in freight transportation, using discrete choice analysis. Data originate from a large survey among global shippers. The results show that, under certain conditions, most shippers are willing to hand over mode selection authority to the service provider. Using latent class analysis, we classify shippers into four market segments, each with a different degree of willingness against different types of performance improvements. Firms can use this characterization of freight transportation demand to design service packages that will meet the demands of global supply chains.

This paper presents a new method for measuring and improving production time and cost performance by applying project management concepts and methods. In the context of production and manufacturing industries, we demonstrate how to improve production performance by considering production as a project with limited time and budget in order to track the production progress at any given point of time. The proposed approach is capable of monitoring cost and time of production implementation in an adaptive and real-time fashion. According to the fact that in the production and manufacturing environment, cost and time of fulfilling customer demand can be considered as a measure of production performance, this research applied Earned Value Analysis from project management and integrated it with Gain Scheduling Fuzzy Control to design an adaptive monitoring system to support real-time control of production cost and time. Gain Scheduling Fuzzy Control was used to adapt the monitoring system with different conditions of the production environment. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this research is a new application of Fuzzy Adaptive Control in the literature of production and project cost-time performance monitoring. The proposed model in this paper is capable of online monitoring of cost and time performance for different products, at different production periods, and machine centers. The proposed method was implemented successfully in a case study. The results indicated a substantial improvement in production time and cost performance.