Flexibility And Efficiency Evaluation Of Ports As Critical Nodes

Globalization, disruptive forces, ever-shrinking product life cycles, demand for quick response and increased customers'expectations are forcing supply chain partners to ensure better ways of responding and adapting to these challenges to remain competitive by creating more resilient organizations. Resilience enables a company to resist a sharp decline in performance and to minimize the impact of disruptions. Agility, availability, efficiency, flexibility, redundancy, velocity, and visibility are identified, as key characteristics of supply chain resilience Efficiency and flexibility are the two key qualities of supply chain resilience. If an identifying node directly affects the overall resilience of the supply chain, it becomes a critical node. Seaports hold a very important role and on one hand, it acts as "the most critical node" in the supply chain and on the other hand as "the technology node" of international logistics chain. Thus, ports desire logistics flexibility and operational efficiency for improving their service, especially for responsiveness, which is emerging as a strategic initiative in global competitionThe Delphi method is based on the data collected for 40 attributes that are relating to logistics flexibility. This method is used here to identify the most important characteristics of current port operations in order to draw conclusions based on expert opinion about the characteristics significantly contributing to flexibility. The attributes are "deliver quickly and effectively", "implement quick response", "have accurate and timely data", "effect efficient information flow", "interface internal processes", "improve information quality" and "using excellent communication skills and tools". These characteristics are critical for port operation. Furthermore, in regard to the relationship between logistics flexibility (LF) and port operation: general operation, value-added services, and regulatory operation are analyzed.The research shows that LF and general port operation (planning for future operations and capital investments, operating of nautical services and facilities; marketer and trans-shipment services) are the most things that the managers have to emphasize in general port operation that are positively strongly related among all. (0.584081) at shown at equation (5.20). The flexibility of ports is also analyzed through examining 28 characteristics from the perspectives of the strategic flexibility, system flexibility, service-provider flexibility and organizational flexibility. The four top-rated critical characteristics through those characteristics are "variation of workforce size and structure", " ensuring accurate and timely data", "adoption of flexible work-time arrangements" and "compliant export and import clearance" are rating scale showing above 3(average=3). Therefore, these characteristics make a contribution to the flexibility of the port. Preparing for delivery and packaging is the least contribution to flexibility of ports.To measure the efficiency of ports, port throughputs of China and five member countries of ASEAN were examined.using Data Envelopment Analysis. The results indicated that efficiencies of the ports of China have a higher level of performance than the other ASEAN-5 ports. An analysis of the ports of Myanmar was also undertaken from the point of the level of efficiency induced by privatization using DEA-CCR model. The result shows that MITT is the most efficient port amongst all ports possessing a decreasing return to scale meaning that output increases by more than that proportion of increase of the inputs(1.8421 see table 7.6). Therefore, it can be regarded as critical node getting the most flexible and efficiency and this generates resilience.