The study is determined to obtain the answers, by the end of the research, to the following key research questions:
RQ1. What is the role of human factor-related mistakes and errors in logistics industry?
RQ2. What are the causes for human-factor related mistakes in container shipping and freight forwarding?
The answer to the first question will be revealed with the help of literature background and earlier available theoretical knowledge.
The second question will be answered by the literature review, the empirical part and with the help of quantitative survey of the personnel involved into logistics industry, as well as finalized with statistical analysis. Afterwards, the managerial recommendations are presented together with the key results.
1.3. Thesis structure
Figure 2: Thesis structure representation. Source: The Author
The figure above represents the organization of the thesis, which presented the structure as follows: Chapter 2 or the Methodology part will describe the data collection methods employed in the thesis, the factors under investigation and their theoretical justification, as well as brief sub-chapter on the data analysis techniques employed generally and in this thesis particularly. When it comes to the following section 3 or Literature review, firstly the background on the container shipping and logistics will be provided, thereafter the mistakes and errors in logistics, container shipping and freight forwarding will be discussed from
different points of view, especially from the view of existing operational risks. The critical human-related mistakes in all modes of transport will also be identified.
In Chapter 4, the analysis of the data with descriptive analytics will begin and the results of the descriptive analytics employed will be revealed. Consequently, the following chapter will contain the results of the study, which are going to be debated in comparison to previous literature available, and the relevance of the theoretecial knowledge together with the empirically collected and analysed data will be proven.
Finally, the conclusion chapter will be present, where the limitation and challenges of conducting research will be illustrated. Correspondingly, the managerial recommendations and the suggestions for further research will also be revealed.
2 METHODOLOGY
In this part of the thesis, the methodological design is discussed. The choice of reserch method is justified together with the description of emplirical data collection technique and analysis are presented.
Quantitative research together with deductive approach is chosen as the primary analysis instrument, due to a continuously developing topic of human errors that has been familiar to many logistics industry related organizations around the globe. According to the previous literature available for this topic, which is going to be particularly described in Chapter 3, quite significant amount of the organisations face errors in cargo loading procedures, driver’s errors, incorrect cargo handling in the ports, complications in the import procedure due to mistakes in the documentation, sometimes unprofessional forwarding service.
Therefore, there is a missing perspective of errors in operational freight forwarding, container shipping lines, trucking companies caused by office clerks or contributors, responsible for the initial organization of the logistics activities.
Quantitative research method, meanwhile, is the empirical research instrument common for the social phenomenon or human struggling, which is helping in testing theories and
gathered and assessed quantitately variables. These variables are, thereafter, analysed with chosen data analysis methods to identify, whether the question of interest is proven with the analyzed theory (Cresswell, 1994; Yilmaz, 2013) Precisely, quantitative approach in researching helps to obtain a generalized set of findings, with deduction capture the relationship of the variables, predict the outcome of the studied phenomenon. (Yilmaz, 2013)
By the same token, another reason for choosing the quantitative research lies in the fact of simplicity of data collection process, since the numeric results can be easily subjected to
“statistical treatment” of any mathematical models. (Yilmaz, 2013)
Due to the wide availability of the forwarding, shipping and trucking specialists around the world with the very different behavioural patterns, the quantitative research in this case is chosen to collect and quantify the data about the various work-related procedures of such employees, the personal habits, the time management practices, the errors’ and their attitude to thereof, as well as motivation, which will help in identifying the common reasons for the human related mistakes in logistics. As a result, the following variables have been chosen for a study: Motivation, Time Management, Personal lifestyle, Work management and work lifestyle, Mistakes and errors.
The deductive approach is chosen on the grounds of starting from the available theoretecial knowledge observation and continuing the research with the emperical investigation of the causal relationships between the variables, measuring the concepts quantitatively, followed by the generalizations of the research findings. Even though the problem of human errors in container lines and logistics was firstly and foremostly observed by the author being in the industry, whilst later been proven with the existing literature, the deductive approach, which complies the theory as the first source of knowledge, is still employed and is justified with the Literature Review discussed later on in this thesis.