Urban consolidation centres impact on event venues - Applying Materials Flow Mapping and Actor-Resource-Activity on the case study of Svenska Mässan Gothia Towers AB

Abstract: Firms located in urban areas struggle with constraints on space, congestion, safety, pollution, and varying stakeholder demands. These constraints place added pressure on the logistics of these firms and will continue to amplify as populations in cities increase. Cities are major attractors for people and businesses alike due to the diversity, economic activity, events, and overall greater quality of life offered. For cities, events are a great revenue generator. Events are major population attractors creating peaks in tourism and thus boosting the local economy. Events are complex in nature and have similar characteristics to temporary projects. The complexity occurs as a result of having short turn-around times, varying goods requirements and unforeseen occurrences needing flexibility. Coupled with these prerequisites for event hosts, event venues must also consider efficiency, sustainability, and client satisfaction for the overall success of the event. The logistics of events and the impact on the city's existing infrastructure, while important for local economies, is an under researched area. Hence it is critical to examine how solutions presented in the world of urban logistics such as consolidation centres, can be applied to local event venue firms to alleviate stressed filled peaks while keeping a focus on sustainability. To examine the impact of a consolidation centre on an event venue firm a combination of two frameworks can be utilised, the Actor-Resource-Activity (ARA) and Materials-Flow-Mapping (MFM). The ARA framework looks at a firm as a network of interconnected parts while MFM examines a specific process to evaluate the efficiency of each step. The application of the frameworks on the case study firm, Svenska Mässan, will theoretically examine the potential of integrating a consolidation centre on a larger scale and the effects on the firm’s employees. The study results demonstrate the successful application of the frameworks to identify areas of efficiency.