Analysing the impact of value added services at intermodal inland terminals

ABSTRACT

Intermodal inland terminals are about to expand their scope of services. The aim of this work is to reveal a terminal operator's motives behind a strong service offer, to identify promising new value added services (VAS), and to investigate which operational impacts a new service implementation may have on a terminal's performance. International stakeholder workshops and semi-structured interviews with terminal representatives in Belgium and Austria were used to investigate the topic. By applying systems thinking, the information was visualised in causal loop diagrams and validated by two real-world cases. The analysis discloses great differences between services' impacts on a terminal's performance. For terminal managers, benefits in information and time play key roles when thinking about new VAS. The results underline the importance of understanding cascading effects in management decisions at intermodal inland terminals and to think of potential long-term consequences, which might be unnoticed in the first place.

KEYWORDS:

• Value added service
• intermodal inland terminal
• impact analysis
• system dynamics
• causal loop analysis
• logistics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Christian Fikar http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3885-9307

Manfred Gronalt http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0944-4911

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency [Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft] and funded from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration [grant number 853777].