Competencies of operations managers in Indonesian third party logistics and freight forwarding firms

Surviving the recent global financial crisis and following the world-wide economic downturn, Indonesia has remained a vibrant economy with an annual GDP growth of over 6% since 2003. Recently, the Indonesian government has identified the logistics industry as the key sector for further economic growth. But lack of competencies and skills amongst managers of the logistics providers has become a major problem for the Indonesian logistics industry. The objective of this study is to identify operations managers' competency requirements and to develop a comprehensive model of competency for operations managers in third party logistics and freight forwarding firms. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been used to identify the critical competencies in this area derived from local and multinational firms. The final results suggest that out of fifteen competencies considered in the model, transportation and distribution management (TDM), project management (PM), warehouse and inventory management (WMI), continuous improvement (CI) and leadership (L) competencies are found to be the top five most important competencies in the model.