ABSTRACT
Freight transportation selection is of critical importance to the shippers in terms of achieving high customer service level, cost savings and efficiency in the overall supply chain. On the other hand, providers of freight transportation services have been interested in finding out the salient freight transport selection factors of shippers in order to be competitive within freight transport market. These facts have directed the attention of transport and logistics researchers towards the problem of freight transportation selection since the beginning of 1970 and as a result of this many empirical researches and reviews have been realised.
When such evidences as Turkey’s land bridge position both in East-West and South-North axes, economic developments in CIS, Central Asia and Caucasian, productivity increase in Turkey in parallel with Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) and acceleration in the relations with the EU are considered, Turkey has a great potential within the freight transport and logistics activities. The volume of the logistics market in Turkey was estimated to be 1, 5 billion USD in 2000.
Although the importance of freight transport and logistics services has been increasing among companies in Turkey due to the accelerating international trade, the number of the comprehensive studies within the freight transportation selection is negligible. This paper attempts to investigate the liner transportation selection criteria of Turkish Shippers.
A field research was conducted within the framework of the study. After reviewing the attributes used in mode and carrier selection criteria researches, a 24 item importance scale was developed in order to measure the perception of the Turkish liner transport shippers. Questionnaires were mailed with a cover letter to the shippers.
In addition to the descriptive statistics, factor analysis was applied to define the salient liner transportation selection criteria. Reliability and competence was found as the most important factor