UN VAMPIRO ‘DE LIBRO’

The effectiveness of most voluntary sustainable solutions for the logistics industry relies greatly on their acceptance among the practitioners. Hence the issues of fundamental importance in evaluating the potential of these solutions in practice are the attitudinal/behavioural patterns of the companies. Even for the sustainable solutions designed to be implemented mandatorily, their impacts on the companies involved will largely determine their performance once enforced. This section deals with these issues by revealing the survey results on the evaluation of the pre-established sustainable framework consisting of 14 solutions by the respondents.

Out of the 14 categories of sustainable solutions, the participants of the survey were asked to choose and rank the five of them which have the most appreciable impacts on their logistics operations. The consequently generated ordinal data set contains richer and more informative contents than the results of a multiple-choice question.

However, the respondents were not required to rank the entire list of 14 solutions, since some previous studies show that the ranking data beyond the fourth-ranked option tend to be unreliable due to increasing difficulty in management of the task (Bradley and Daly, 1994).

The Pareto diagram of Figure 4.9 provides an overall perspective of the way the pre-constructed framework is perceived by the respondents. Of all the 130 respondents, 15 failed to give valid answers to the question. This is mainly attributable to the nature of the forced ranking questions of this kind being prone to respondent error. However, since the invalid/missing data only constitutes a minor part of the entire sample, this is not considered a major concern in the study.

Figure 4.9: 14 Sustainable solutions by their perceived impacts on respondents

Source: author’s questionnaire survey, stage 1; N =115 (multiple response)

By treating each entry of the data as nominal, the scenario is simplified to a basic choice model where the perceived importance of the candidate solutions can be ranked by the number of times they were selected (i.e. frequency). In descending order by number of votes received, the five most influential categories are: diesel fuel taxation on road transport, vehicle design technology, information and communication technology (ICT), driver training, and supply chain optimisation.

Altogether, these five solutions have taken more than half of the votes, indicating their great implications for shaping sustainable practices in the industry.

However, the priorities appear to shift across the sustainable solutions in terms of their impacts when the LSPs and LSUs groups are examined individually. In total, 60 valid responses were received from the LSPs group, and 55 from LSUs. Figure 4.10 highlights the variations between their choices.

Figure 4.10: 14 sustainable solutions by their perceived impacts on respondents

Source: author’s questionnaire survey, stage 1; N=115 (multiple response)

Measured by the absolute number of times that each solution was chosen by the respondents, three solutions from the top five (as ranked when the two groups are combined together) still made it into the top five within both groups, although in different orders. They are diesel fuel taxation on road transport, ICT, and vehicle design technology. For LSPs driver training and road pricing made the other two positions; whilst government support and supply chain optimisation complete the top five in the LSUs group. Table 4.4 provides the results from both groups, listing the six most selected measures by each group. The sixth was included for the reason that the frequencies of each of them are very close to those of the fifth in both groups.

Table 4.4: Six most selected sustainable solutions by group

Source: author’s questionnaire survey, stage 1; N =115 (multiple response)

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1 Diesel fuel taxation on road transport 42 Supply chain optimisation 32

2 Driver training 37 Vehicle design technology 30

3 Vehicle design technology 36 ICT 29

4 ICT 29 Government support 28

5 Road pricing 26 Diesel fuel taxation on road transport 27

6 Alternative fuels 25 Reverse logistics 25

In order to incorporate the ordered nature of the data provided by respondents when valuing and comparing the five most influential measures in question (the partial ranking), a simple technique of weighted frequency can be applied, where the first priority is given the weight of 5, the second of 4, and so on. By multiplying the weight of each priority given to a certain solution by the number of times it was selected, the respective weight of a priority for each solution can be calculated. The sum of the weights for all the five priorities gives a total score for every solution.

Table 4.5 summarises the results obtained by applying this technique.

Table 4.5: The weighted ranking of 14 sustainable solutions by LSPs, by LSUs, and combined

Source: author’s questionnaire survey, stage 1; total number of respondents for each group in column headings

Ranking N=115 LSPs (n=60) LSUs (n=55)

1 Diesel Fuel Taxation Diesel Fuel Taxation Supply Chain Optimisation

2 Driver Training Driver Training Diesel Fuel Taxation

3 Vehicle Design Technology Road Pricing ICT

4 Supply Chain Optimisation Vehicle Design Technology Vehicle Design Technology

5 ICT Alternative Fuels Government Support

6 Road Pricing ICT Road Pricing

7 Alternative Fuels Supply Chain Optimisation Alternative Fuels

8 Government Support Government Support Driver Training

9 Environmental Management and Auditing Environmental Management and Auditing Reverse Logistics

10 Reverse Logistics Modal Shift Environmental Management and Auditing

11 Modal Shift Product/Packaging Design Modal Shift

12 Product/Packaging Design Reverse Logistics Urban Logistics

13 Inclusion of Transport in the EU ETS Inclusion of Transport in the EU ETS Inclusion of Transport in the EU ETS

14 Urban Logistics Urban Logistics Product/Packaging Design

Comparing the weighted ranking results to the ones derived from absolute frequencies, the top six sustainable solutions remain very much the same for each group, as well as for both combined, although the rank within the six does change considerably due to the distribution of the priorities. For instance, regarding the top six solutions, the only discrepancy resulting from applying the weighted ranking technique is reverse logistics being replaced by road pricing in the LSUs group. This is because although the former had more ‗votes‘ from the responding LSUs, many (11 out of 25) of them gave it the lowest priority; while road pricing is outnumbered by reverse logistics by four votes, yet a large proportion of the votes had higher ranks, hence causing it to overtake reverse logistics with a higher overall weighted score.