| dc.description.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. | en_US |
