Liberalisation, commercialisation and globalisation have significantly increased growth, complexity and competitiveness in logistic chains. This growth has placed a high demand on intermodal transport systems leading to the need for continuous and integrated transport planning to improve system efficiency and reliability. To maintain a sustainable and cost efficient transport system, it is important to strengthen the position of inland navigation. This means, from an environmental point of view, reducing the amount of pollution and energy consumption. Inland navigation also provides jobs and contributes to local and regional development (see Schweighofer and Blaauw 2009).rn
rnIt is necessary to make the specific strengths and weaknesses of different transport modes comparable (see EC White Paper 2001). There is a need for standardised and accepted instruments that allow decision makers to analyse the performance against objectives and to evaluate achievements (see Neely et al. 2005), Keller and Hellingrath 2007). Currently there is no commonly accepted system for measuring and evaluating the performance of different transport modes. Especially for inland navigation, information on capacity, reliability and applicability for intermodal transport is needed to enable comparability to other transport modes (see Sammer et al. 2008).rn
rnPerformance indicators provide an effective and practically approved method to support decision making processes by working out the causes and effects that directly and indirectly influence the achievement of goals and corresponding results (see Van Landeghem and Persoons 2001).rnThe real challenge is to develop applicable performance indicators in the different sectors limited for inland navigation to support correct decision making and furthermore improved competitiveness of waterborne transport. rn
rnIn fact, there is actually a need for a standardised set of performance indicators for inland navigation due to the following reasons:rn
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- Common definitions, standards, and measurements to encourage industry-wide adoption of harmonised performance indicators and best practices are missing.rn
- Shipping industry and forwarders are suffering from a lack of transparency in documentation.rn
- There is no effective utilisation of existing transport potentials and information exchange.rn
- Currently only a limited set of data is available for supporting transport activities and in a cross-national context neither a harmonised structure nor a common way of application is available.rn
- Currently performance indicators are only used on an individual- or company level for improvement of quality and benchmarking.rn
rnThere is a need for a common understanding of the benefits, goals and the nature of performance indicators to guarantee active participation of all stakeholders. The development of appropriate service performance indicators for inland waterways will help tie together condition assessment and required levels of service with prioritisation of routine maintenance, major rehabilitation and recapitalisation strategies.rn
rnrnObjectivesrn
rnrnTo reach a common understanding of definitions and measurement standards that encourage industry-wide adaptation of harmonised performance indicators the following targets are pursued: rn
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- Push users and operators to ask actors of other transport modes for their performance indicators. Inland navigation is not able to push other transport modes to also implement performance indicators ? but users can push other transport modes.rn
- Make the performance of inland navigation comparable to other transport modes.rn
- Show actors and users how to implement performance indicators. Therefore, all performance indicators are edited in a standardised way to show potential users the steps which are necessary to develop and how to describe performance indicators.rn
- Stress the importance of a standardised and automatic procedure for basic data collection. It shall not exhibit any contact surface for counterfeit, as the collection of underlying basic data determines the degree of quality of the performance indicators regarding their ability for comparison (true for intermodal comparison, as well as modal comparison on transnational level).rn
- Ease application, strengthen acceptance and push the implementation of performance indicators. Hence, the recommended performance indicators are based on already existing and available basic data.rn
- Motivate inland waterway actors and users all over the world to collect data on performance and define performance indicators using the collected data. rn
- Enable a common basis of comparable data on performance for inland navigation.rn
- Guarantee transparency in reporting on performance.rn
- Increase the quality and attractiveness on the one hand and the exploitation of cost savings on the other hand.rn
- Enable stakeholders to measure, manage and communicate their performance in a commonly accepted way.rn
- Provide measures that enable timely feedback for users and ensure action on time.rn
- Eliminate the difficulty of comparing parameters across countries.rn
- Induce a long-term continuous improvement process.rnrn
rnrnThis Manual provides a standard set of performance indicators for users and actors. The recommended set allows emphasising the advantages of inland navigation to improve its acceptance in modern supply chains. Further it is intended to show actors how they can appropriately measure how well their performance comes up to their users? expectations and how to proactively improve the overall performance of inland navigation.rn
rnrnCompiling Procedurern
rnrnPIANC ExCom has confirmed the proposed Terms of Reference (ToR) by InCom in 2007. This approach contains the reflection of the critical success factors and the improvement of the overall performance of inland navigation. Therefore, common definitions, standards and measurements are provided to encourage an industry-wide acceptance. In a first step technical and non-technical performance criteria that determine the overall attractiveness of inland navigation had to be defined. In a second step these criteria were evaluated and for each criterion a list of performance indicators was developed to validate the importance of the criteria. rn
