Investigating the feasibility of enhancing the efficiency and sustainability of event logistics in urban areas with application of Actor-Resource-Activity and Materials Flow Mapping

Firms located in urban areas struggle with constraints on space, congestion, safety, pollution, and varying stakeholder demands. These constraints place added pressure on their logistics activities which will grow as populations in cities increase. Cities are major attractors for people and businesses alike due to the diversity, economic activity, events, and overall greater quality of life offered. For cities, events are a great revenue generator. Events are major population attractors creating peaks in tourism and thus boosting the local economy. Events are complex in nature and have similar characteristics to temporary projects such as construction. The complexity is driven by short turn-around times, varying goods requirements and unforeseen occurrences needing flexibility. Coupled with the complexity, event venues must also consider efficiency, sustainability, and client satisfaction for the overall success of the event. The logistics of events and the impact on the city's existing infrastructure, while important for local economies, is an under researched area. Hence it is critical to examine how solutions such as consolidation centres, can be applied to event venues to improve sustainability and enhance operational efficiency. To examine the impact of a consolidation centre on an event venue a combination of two frameworks have been used, the Actor-Resource-Activity (ARA) and Materials-Flow-Mapping (MFM). The ARA framework looks at a firm as a network of interconnected parts while MFM examines a specific process to evaluate the efficiency of each step. The application of the frameworks on the case study firm, Svenska Mässan, evaluates the potential of integrating a consolidation centre on a larger scale and addresses the role of the firm's employees in supporting such change management. The study demonstrates the successful application of the frameworks to identify opportunities for both greater efficiency and increased sustainability.