Urban Consolidation and Logistics Pooling - Sustainable Urban Logistics: Concepts, Methods and Information Systems - page 191

• Technological risks. In general, the technological problems are chiefly related to
functionality, robustness and compatibility. It is important to examine these
questions before making any technological decision or choice.
• Risks related to policies, processes and current practices. The development and
use of new logistics solutions may require an important change in the way
people think and act to make them operative. Continuous social analysis during
all the design and development phases seems crucial to the stability and success
of very innovative solutions.
• Risks related to the impact of the systems in current and future operations, at
both human and technical levels.
• Dependency risks. In an information system based on several technologies, the
dysfunction of any one technology can impair the efficiency of the whole system
or even bring it to a halt. These risks have to be studied in the preliminary phase
of a project.
3.2 Project Targets, Evaluation Methods
and Performance Measurement
This module includes the main objectives of the project and the evaluation of its
performance (Laudon and Laudon 2007 ). Although at the end of the 20th century
the notion of performance was basically related to economic indicators, the notion
of sustainability is nowadays a central element in transportation and logistics
planning and management. Sustainable development is at the conjunction of three
spheres: the first deals with the economic aspects, the second contains the social
and societal elements, and the third is related to the environmental challenges. In
this context, a list of indicators has been defined. They are derived from an in-
depth bibliographical analysis (Morana and Gonzalez-Feliu 2012 ). We report here
the main indicators that should be considered when evaluating the performance of
urban logistics systems. For the method and discussion of the retained indicators,
see Morana and Gonzalez-Feliu ( 2012 ) (Table 2 ).
3.3 Stakeholders and their Involvement in Logistics Sharing
Several stakeholders interact along a supply chain in order to complete all the tasks
necessary to first produce, and then distribute a given product to a given retailer. In
this section, we will present the main categories of actors in logistics and their
potential domains of sharing, focusing on the logistics of urban distribution. We
will also list the main categories of actors in the freight transportation field that can
be directly concerned by logistics sharing. Since a detailed description of urban
logistics stakeholders are presented in the first chapter of this topic, we propose a
synthetic overview below.