Mats Janné

Coming from a transport logistics and city logistics perspective, the past five years I have focused on the importance of efficient construction logistics within the urban transport system. With the increased urbanization trend and densification of cities (United Nations, 2015) there is an increased need for city development, i.e. to build apartment buildings, hospitals, schools and infrastructure in cities and urban areas to meet the rising demands. This means that multiple individual construction projects are being built in the same or nearby areas during the same time-period. However, the end products of construction projects are produced at their place of consumption, which means that large quantities of materials and resources need to be delivered to, and removed from, each construction site. This leads to new transport flows being created in connection to city development. These transport flows need to be coordinated to ensure efficient construction productivity and reduce the transports’ environmental and social impact on the urban transport system. At the same time, it is important to ensure that construction sites can be managed from a logistics perspective without impairing efficiency due to the challenges of building in urban environments. One way of managing logistics to and from construction projects in city development is through so-called construction logistics setups (CLS). 

However, the implementation and utilization of CLS’s affect many different stakeholders and the interorganizational relationships between them. Contractors focus on ensuring that deliveries of materials, machinery, and resources are made in a way that allows the construction project to progress efficiently without delays due to poor logistics or material and resource shortages. At the same time, developers seek to reduce disturbances from construction projects on their tenants and businesses close by construction projects, and municipalities seek to reduce disturbances to the urban transport system and the citizens. 

In my research, I have identified that the implementation and utilization of CLSs face three challenges that needs to be addressed and managed; transports to and from construction sites, logistics at construction sites, and the interorganizational relationships amongst construction project stakeholders. My research is focused on increasing the knowledge on how to manage these challenges, taking a qualitative approach to investigating CLSs, their drivers and barriers, and the effects that can be seen from the contractors’, the developers’ and the municipalities’ perspectives. 

Over the past five years, I have alongside my co-authors investigated more than 15 individual CLSs through case studies to increase the knowledge on how they work, what has been difficult operationalizing them, and what effects they have had from different stakeholders’ perspectives. The research has yielded three published journal articles (Janné and Fredriksson, 2019, Janné and Rudberg, 2020, Fredriksson et al., 2021), one licentiate thesis (Janné, 2018), one doctoral dissertation (Janné, 2020), and a number of conference articles (Janné, 2016, Janné and Fredriksson, 2018a, Janné and Fredriksson, 2018b, Janné et al., 2019) as well as articles currently under review in academic journals (Fredriksson et al., 2019, Janné and Fredriksson, 2021).