Improved Vehicle Utilization

Improved Vehicle Utilization

Book: McKinnon, A., Cullinane, S., Browne, M., & Whiteing, A. (2010). Green Logistics: Improving the

environmental sustainability of logistics. London: Kogan Page.

Choose one of the chapters for this week (Chapter 8, 9, 10). Critique, judge, and assess the value you
place on the information provided by the authors. This is not a summary of the chapter but your thoughts

on the author’s perspective.

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Improved Vehicle Utilization

Improved vehicle utilization has various advantages such as reducing environmental
impact and yielding sustainable economy which is usually caused by an increase in oil prices and
increase on transport cost. Improved vehicle utilization also reduces traffic congestion on the
road. All this poses environmental, economic and infrastructural benefit. There are various ways
in which vehicle utilization can be measured (Aziz, 2018).
The author outlined exhaustively four ways in which vehicle utilization can be measured.
The methods cannot however sufficiently explain vehicle utilization. For instance, in using
tonne-kilometer per vehicle per annum, it does not take into accounts the cost incurred due to
high fuel consumption when the vehicle is carrying a heavy load. Thus one can be carrying the
maximum load but incurring some losses on the process.
Weight-based lading factor takes the ratio of the goods carried by the vehicle to
maximum weight it can carry. This method is only suitable for high-density goods. For low-
density goods that are quite bulky, a clear image of vehicle utilization might not be brought out.
The vehicle can also be carrying goods below maximum weight, but of extreme value which will
not be accounted for by this method.
Space utilization requires that maximum space available in the truck be used. This
method is efficient for unitized items (Yao, Chen, & Nemery, (2018). However, the amount of
space that can be utilized is limited by nature of goods on transit, for instance, while transporting
vehicles using a truck, it is impossible to utilize the entire space in the vehicle.
Empty running refers to the distance covered by a vehicle while carrying no load. For
maximum utilization of a vehicle, this criterion requires that minimum distance be covered while

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the truck is empty. This is difficult to achieve due to an imbalance due to outbound deliveries
and returns journey. It is difficult for most transport companies to plan for transportation of
goods when the vehicle is returning after delivering the outbound goods.
Since the method outlined by the author are not sufficient to measure vehicle utilization,
other methods can be utilized in addition to the ones provided. This includes; Vehicle arriving
and leaving time, a time taken to travel from one job to another, the idle time of a vehicle and
time consumed by a vehicle during maintenance.
In the case of lack of knowledge of loading opportunities, the author clearly outlined that
if all loads are available for delivery at all times, it would be possible to attain a high level of
vehicle loading (McKinnon, Cullinane, Browne, & Whiteing, (2010). This is a brilliant idea as
the trucks which have delivered their cargo can as well carry an outbound cargo from the area of
delivery to another. This may sometimes be risky as goods require clearing by customs and some
companies have the phobia that the outbound cargo may take time.
Just in time delivery may sometimes affect maximum vehicle utilization .this is evident in
which cargo which is in small quantity may be very urgent hence making a truck to ferry cargo
while half full, in addition, the author has clearly outlined this circumstance, but has not given
the necessary remedy to this problem, as he outlined that cargo should be clustered in
warehouses, but sometimes some cargo is very urgent to be held in warehouses. Furthermore,
some goods are perishable and can’t be held in warehouses.
Addressing the case of weight restriction and vehicle size, the author clearly stated that to
consolidate more goods on a vehicle, the size of the vehicle should be increased. However,
taking into consideration infrastructural constraints, there is a maximum road size which a

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vehicle cannot exceed. Either way, increasing the height of the vehicle may cause the vehicle to
be unstable leading to an accident. The author should have instead come up with other better
packaging techniques to consolidate more goods.

Conclusion

Improved vehicle utilization has many advantages in our modern life. From the above
discussion, the author of the book has clearly outlined some various ways and advantages of
improving vehicle utilization. However, some various ways outlined by the author to enhance
maximum vehicle utilization are not applicable in our modern life.

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References

Aziz, M. (2018, February).Electric vehicle utilization for ancillary grid services. In AIP
Conference Proceedings (Vol. 1931, No. 1, p. 030069). AIP Publishing

McKinnon, A., Cullinane, S., Browne, M., & Whiteing, A. (2010). Green Logistics: Improving

the environmental sustainability of logistics. London: Kogan Page.
Yao, R., Chen, X., & Nemery, P. (2018). U.S. Patent Application No. 15/203,955.