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ABSTRACT
Selecting freight carrier is one of the most important activities in supply chain management since transportation significantly affect cost, efficiency, ability to deliver the product to customer on time, and customer satisfaction. As a result, shippers are focusing on developing framework and selection criteria to ensure that they select the right carrier. For freight carrier, it is also important to understand how its customers (shippers) select carrier. By identifying selection criteria, freight carrier will be able to focus its resources and efforts to improve the areas that are more important for customer. Japanese automotive company in Thailand is one of the most important groups of customer for ocean freight carrier due to high shipment volumes both in importing parts to assemble and exporting vehicles to other countries. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to identify criteria that Japanese automotive companies use in order to choose ocean freight carrier. Five selection criteria are identified which include reliability of service, quality of service, cost, after-sale service, and perceived capability. The result shows that after-sale service is the most influential factor affecting the ocean carrier, followed by reliability of service. These findings are beneficial for ocean freight carrier in order to develop strategy to attract and retain its customers. Focusing solely on service price (cost) is no longer sufficient in today competition; carrier should place more attention to train its people and focus on customer-oriented strategy.
INTRODUCTION
Since 2008, Thailand export value has been decreased in terms of both value and growth rate due to global financial crisis together with appreciate value of Thai Baht against U.S dollar in 2013. The growth rate was at negative 3.72 percent in the second quarter of 2013, and the value of exporting was at 3.34 billion Baht compared to 3.46 billion in 2012. The decline in exporting undoubtedly affects demand for freight transportation especially sea transportation since demand for transportation is a derived demand. Furthermore, with the advancement in ship technology, vessel size has been increasing in order to achieve economy of scale. Unfortunately, this also contributes to the situation that the supply side of transportation (carrier capacity) starts to be higher than the demand from shipper. Thus, competition among ocean freight carriers has been more intense....