Analysis of Factors of Spot Freight Rate for Sustainable Supply Chain Management in India

For a sustainable and eco-friendly supply chain, the objective is to reduce the harmful effects on the environment caused by a variety of factors, such as supply chain revenue and profit concerns, water and energy use and waste production. The primary barrier to more sustainable supply chains is cost, and smaller enterprises in particular find it difficult to pay for the upfront expenses. The prices are utmost important in freight forwarding services. The chapter aims to identify the different variables that affect the spot freight rate, considering a small number of Indian logistics firms, and to determine the spot freight rate factors that affects freight rates and supply chain management's sustainability. Using a structured questionnaire, the information was gathered from 308 logistics service companies. Descriptive statistics was used and factor analysis using principal component analysis (PCA) are the tools and methodologies employed for the analysis of the data gathered. The software tool utilized for the data analysis is SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) 17.0. SPSS helps to obtain clear and precise results. From the analysis, it was deduced that there are five factors of spot freight rate which was done by using factor analysis using PCA, which affects the volatility explaining a total of 67.75% variation in the data set. The study shows that these identified factors impact the freight rate and also the sustainability in management of supply chain practices in India.