Abstract
Article history: Received January 2, 2013 Received in revised format 29 April 2013 Accepted May 1 2013 Available online May 4 2013 One of the important issues in port services is to evaluate the performance of the services. Without evaluating port services and their related components, these services cannot be considered desirable and its quality cannot be enhanced. However, the evaluation and the quality assurance of port services should be accomplished based on a scientific framework and a coherent framework to have desirable results. The importance-performance analysis model is an appropriate framework where each component is evaluated in terms of two dimensions of importance and performance. This study performs performance-importance analysis of ports’ services quality form perspective of containerized liner shipping in the Imam Khomeini port. In this exploratory study, 150 shipping lines experts are chosen, randomly in 2012. The study identifies 28 components of quality in port services and shipping lines’ experts are requested to evaluate these components in terms of two dimensions of importance and performance. Results reveal that there is a gap between the importance and performance of all port services components except three components of 6, 19 and 24. In addition, the results indicate that Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) model is capable of evaluating and assuring quality in port services and can precisely identify the strengths and weaknesses of the seaport system and provide guidance for strategy formulation for quality improvement. © 2013 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Highlights
During the past few years, there have been tremendous change on sea transportation and these various changes have created rivalry circumstances among the other ports due to enhancement of demands for goods as well as economic growth
The primary objective of this study is to evaluate and to assure the port’s servicing quality from the containerized liner shipping lines in Imam Khomeini port by using the Importance-performance analysis
The level of importance average of the quality attributes from the two perspectives of shipping experts ports and maritime organization experts
Summary
During the past few years, there have been tremendous change on sea transportation and these various changes have created rivalry circumstances among the other ports due to enhancement of demands for goods as well as economic growth. To assure and to maintain a high level of the market and maritime transportation, we should save this rivalry situation and enhance the satisfying services for the customers in the ports This could be accomplished by providing optimized fields and terminating the weak spots of the transportation to keep its quality and to assure good port servicing (Beach & Burns, 1995; Hansen & Bush, 1999). From this point, assuring and evaluating the quality of the services are considered as important issues, which could be leading factors in the rivalry world and contentment for the customers and remedial for the port development (Arasli et al, 2005)
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