Open Access

Jens Eschenbächer, Jost Wiethölter, Linus Kühl

• Against the setting of an increasing need for innovation and low margins, companies in the logistics sector are facing highly competitive pressure. One field with high potential for optimization lies within damage quotas. The use of big data analytics or data mining represents a promising approach to face this challenge. However, within supply chain management, data mining is hardly being researched on regarding damage quotas and thus not being utilized to its full possible extend. At the current time it seems to predominantly be used for route and utilization optimization while the analysis of delivery damages is hardly considered. The aim of this research is therefore to showcase an initial approach for data mining in logistics to predict delivery damage probabilities and to validate this by means of a multiple case study research. To create a sound basis for evaluation, the groundwork is laid out based on CRISP-DM by the analysis of reference data (German road-cargo market). As a central result it is noted that data mining can systematically be used to help reducing the damages by forecasting the probabilities of damages occurring during transport in dependence of different factors. The approach can be utilized across different markets as long as sufficient data tracking delivery damages is being collected within a company. Challenges arise in the field of air- and sea-freight.