Amentae, Tadesse Kenea
- Department of Energy and Technology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Research article2015Peer reviewedOpen access
Amentae, Tadesse Kenea; Gebresenbet, Girma
Freight transport system that minimizes costs, increase conveniences, and environmentally safe has become the agenda worldwide since long before. This study was made with the main objective of assessing intermodal termed as “multimodal” freight transport service in Ethiopia. Data was collected by using structured questionnaire from randomly selected customers and multimodal freight transport section employees of Ethiopian Shipping and Logistics Service Enterprise. The study was made in two stages using customers: first, they were asked to evaluate their satisfaction with the multimodal freight transport system; second, to evaluate their comparative satisfaction with the segmented/“uni-modal” freight transport system against five major freight transport performance indicators. Customers were also asked to identify and rank top ten problems of freight transport logistics in Ethiopia. Data were analyzed using SPSS and excel sheets with descriptive statistics and the results were depicted using charts and tables. The study indicated that majority of customers were either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with many of the performance indicators. The employees evaluated their organization as well performing relatively on more performance indicators. Both customers and employees evaluated the documentation performances as satisfying but cost and convenience as dissatisfying performances. Customers identified repetitive custom checking and waste of time in custom inspections process as the most severe problem in freight transport logistics in Ethiopia. The implementation of intermodal freight transport system to bring better change in import-export freight transport logistics of Ethiopia was in bitter challenge for customers due to a number of problems, except documentation performance that showed betterment.
Freight Transport; Performance; Multi-Modal; Uni-Modal; Customers’ Satisfaction; Employees’ Evaluation; Ethiopia
Journal of Service Science and Management
2015, Volume: 8, number: 1, pages: 57-70
Business Administration
Transport Systems and Logistics
Social Sciences Interdisciplinary
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4236/jssm.2015.81007
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/64905