Logistics Assessment of Functional Performance of Material Flows in Railway Transport

The article includes the proposal of new methodology assessment of functional performance of material flows as a tool for management decision-making in the selection of suitable suppliers of logistical services in railway transport. This selection is based on evaluation of key indicators and determination of their weights. The evaluation of the indicators and determination of their weights is realised by mathematic methods.


The proposal assessment methodology
The methodology is conceived to be usable for any company that will need to assess the functional performance of material flow in the implementation by different suppliers based on objective indicators. The procedure we propose is depicted in the following breakdown (see Fig.1).  The reliability compliance with the time of delivery (transit) 2.
Total transit time (from border to border) 3.
Total price from sender to recipient 4.
Quality of forwarding services 5.
The possibility of find shipments 6.
Providing regular monitoring of movement shipments 7.
Insurance of transported shipments 8.
Guarantee the protection of goods against loss, damage or breach of 9.
The range and quality of services provided at the state border in railway transport 10.
Possibility to provide customs operations necessary for the further handling of goods 11. Staff qualifications and competence 12.
Language skills of staff 13.
Economic and financial stability of supplier 14.
The quality of the sale of services, ease to negotiate competitive prices 15.
Possession of the necessary equipment. Ability to ensure the equipment for handling goods 16.
Ability to provide the type or kind of vehicle for further transportationsuch as the transshipment

17.
Readiness supplier negotiations on the revision services 18.
The complexity of the order process required services 19.
Readiness supplier negotiations on the revision price 20.
Availability of storage 21.
Secure store against theft 22.
Insurance of goods in the store 23.
Warehouse staff training required for handling the types of goods 24.
The owner of the certificate of quality ISO 25.
A member of FIATA 26.
A member of Association of Logistics and Freight Forwarding of the Slovak Republic

27.
Additional services required for the treatment of goods before delivery to the customer (for example, assembling packages) 28.
Possibility to provide palletizing goods during transshipment 29.
Possibility to provide strapping goods during transshipment 30.
Possibility to provide foiling goods during transhipment 31.
Possibility to provide selection of suitable wagons for loading 32.
Possibility to provide sorting of goods according to specified criteria 33.
Supplementary criteria for supplier selection

Determination of sensitivity for the assessment of individual indicators
By determining the sensitivity of indicators identifies a threshold when the indicator crosses the border between the two evaluations. Determination of the sensitivity of indicators: a -The supplier can arrange the selected indicator accurately according to requirements without the need to use the agreed tolerances the supplier can propose new quality or costeffective solutions.
b -The supplier can arrange the selected indicator, as required by agreed tolerance without intervention of customer.
c -New supplier with good references. d -The supplier can arrange the selected indicator, does not respect the agreed limits of tolerance, the intervention of the customer. e -The supplier can arrange the selected indicator, exceeds the limits of the agreed tolerance and waits for the customer intervention, is required constant monitoring of suppliers to meet contractual obligations.
f -New customer without reference. g -The supplier cannot provide the selected indicator, despite contractual obligations to the client.

The selection of key indicators of evaluation and determination of their weights mathematical methodsmodel example
In determining the estimated weights KEI, we used more mathematical methods: • The order method, • The scoring method, • Method pairwise comparisons -Fuller method, • Method of quantitative pairwise comparisons of indicators (Saaty´s method).
We select KEI to test the procedure for assessing the functional performance of the material flows implemented by multiple vendors. From general evaluation indicators (Table  1)  We will consider the following order of importance, KEI: 1,4=5,7,20 which means that I1 indicator will be most important, for it will I4 and I5 indicators as important, then followed I7 and at the end of I20. The indicator that is least important.
For all the methods used to determine the weights we will be based on the same initial assumptions.
We choose weights always so that the total weight of all KEI selected for a specific model example equal to one. If the weight for the i-th indicator I tag vi for i = 1, 2, ...u, where "u" is the number of indicators, then for the relationship will apply: (1) i = 1 When determining the weights of indicators allocate more weight to the criterion which is important. We weight assigned to the selected indicators under the terms of the sum of weights equal to one (as stated above) or by using mathematical methods that were used for the model example.

Comparison of the estimated weights for the key evaluation indicators by different methods
In Table 2, we make a direct comparison between different methods of estimating weights. The Saaty´s method the most sensitive assigns appropriate assessment of individual indicators [10,11], so we decided to use the results of this method in further calculations. We consider about six suppliers of services in the model example [12]. We evaluated KEI for each supplier selected on experience while respecting of sensitivity assigned the evaluation.
Overall evaluation of the individual KEI for the particular supplier: where : The supplier with the highest sum of evaluations KEI will head order suppliers and I give him 1st place [13]. A detailed overview of our assessment of suppliers Table 3 provides.

Conclusions
In further work we will elaborate in more detail using entropic methods [3,10] to determine the weights of individual indicators for cases where we do not clearly identified priorities between individual KEI. In further work we will elaborate in more detail using entropic methods [3,10] for determining weights of individual KEI in cases where we do not clearly identified priorities between indicators. In this case, individual KEI assigns different probabilities. Preliminary calculations show that the process is very sensitive to the objectivity of input information, which then affects a significant degree of uncertainty (entropy) and thus the weight of the selected KEI. Higher sensitivity could this method ever closer to objective evaluation weights the key evaluation indicators (KEI). This paper is supported by the research project "From horse-drawn railway to intermodal transport" within Visegrad Fund.

Indicators
The