Intermodal Freight Transport - Evaluating the Suitability of Future Potential Implementations - A Case Study of Volvo Car Corporation

Abstract: Environmental awareness has become increasingly more important for governmental and non-governmental organizations throughout the years, pushing organizations to better their operations with the aim to reduce environmental impact. One of the organizations aiming to reduce their environmental impact is Volvo Cars, which, through various organizational improvement efforts, has managed to reach environmental sustainability-related goals. Therefore, this thesis was established to provide Volvo Cars with a generally applicable evaluation method used for assessing potential intermodal rail-road transportation setups, with the aim of improving organizational environmental sustainability and maintaining operational quality excellence. The evaluation method was generated through a combination of theoretical and empirical findings, resulting in 12 main parameters needed to take into consideration when operating a rail-road intermodal network. The parameters generated from the results were; Volvo Cars’ Volume, Clustering Volume, Infrastructure, Terminal, Risk Management, Delivery Accuracy, Lead Time, Economic-, Social-, and Environmental Sustainability as well as Distance and Border Simplicity. Each parameter was given an individual weight, depending on its importance when evaluating the attractiveness of a potential setup. The established weights were critical, major, and preferable. Additionally, each parameter could be given a maximum overall score of 6, where a score of 3 was the critical level for meeting Volvo Cars’ expectation criteria. Each evaluation could also be visually illustrated in a pie radar chart diagram for easy interpretation.