A Multi-Criteria Approach to the Evaluation of Aviation e-marketplace portals

Edward Sweeney, Dublin Institute of Technology
Emilio Esposito, University of Naples
Pietro Evangelista, Institute for Service Industry Research (IRAT)
Michele Mastroianni, University of Naples
Renato Passaro, University of Naples
Claudia-Maria Wagner, Dublin Institute of Technology

Published: Enhancing Competitive Advantage through Supply Chain Innovation, Proceedings of the 9th Annual Conference of the Logistics Research Network, pp. 174-182, Dublin, September 2004

Abstract

After a proliferation of logistics e-Marketplaces during the dot.com boom of 1998-2000, there has been a high rate of failure and survivals are developing much more slowly than expected. This is the case of aviation industry where a large number of B2B e-Marketplaces emerged according to the focus of aviation companies’ strategies on electronic B2B in the late 1990s. However, the current use of e-Marketplaces in the industry is low and many of them have ceased trading. The traditional e-Marketplaces model have been characterised by poor quality of portals and the lack of technical standards. Such an approach is unsustainable in today’s competitive scenario. Improvements in websites quality attributes may strongly contribute to simplify the website functionalities by users and speed-up communication with all supply chain parties. In such context, it appears of critical importance
to develop models for the evaluation of e-Marketplaces web sites. This paper, after a discussion about the development of e-Marketplaces in the transport and logistics service industry and its application in
the aviation industry, proposes a multi-criteria model for assessing e-Marketplaces portals that has been subsequently applied to three different types of aeronautic B2B e-Marketplaces.