Analysing the impact of value added services at intermodal inland terminals

Intermodal inland terminals are about to expand their scope of services. The aim of this work is to reveal a terminal operator's motives behind a strong service offer, to identify promising new value added services (VAS), and to investigate which operational impacts a new service implementation may have on a terminal's performance. International stakeholder workshops and semi-structured interviews with terminal representatives in Belgium and Austria were used to investigate the topic. By applying systems thinking, the information was visualised in causal loop diagrams and validated by two real-world cases. The analysis discloses great differences between services' impacts on a terminal's performance. For terminal managers, benefits in information and time play key roles when thinking about new VAS. The results underline the importance of understanding cascading effects in management decisions at intermodal inland terminals and to think of potential long-term consequences, which might be unnoticed in the first place.