One of the hardest parts of a FQP is to maintain significant levels of interest among members. To obtain a constant commitment, it is essential to quickly achieve the desired objectives and deliverables, otherwise partners will most likely tend to lose interest if they see that results are slow to be reached.  

It is critical to involve businesses and freight industry stakeholders in the management of the FQP by chairing it, leading individual initiatives, etc. and to emphasize the benefits of this procedure. 

By setting a schematic timetable from the beginning, each FUA should be able to plan each activity avoiding delays. The frequency of stakeholder meetings should also be varied in order to match the state of progress and alter the duration of each meeting to adapt to the necessities of the partners. In some cases, it might be useful to change the format of these meetings according to each FUA necessities. Here below there are some general suggestions for the organization of the meetings: 

• one meeting every 3 months (4 meetings per year). The event could last half day; 
• the agenda of the meeting should be sent 2 weeks before the event; 

• the same people should be invited to each meeting, but the participation should also be flexible: new participants can be invited; 
• a meeting minutes should be prepared after each meeting and shared with all participants by including also the next steps. 

Moreover, the relevance of publicity and dissemination must be not overlooked to increase the influence of FQP. Local media and press could be used to get local news coverage, and websites to make all the documents and reports available. Examples of initiatives that need a dissemination element are driver information maps and the promotion of best practice in vehicle standards and efficient logistics.  

Eventually, all this work has to be monitored and evaluated. The first action allows to verify that the FQP reach the goals, while the second operation is used to judge the outcomes and outputs, either positive or negative. 

Monitoring

This activity should be carried out regularly to verify that the FQP is going on as planned and to identify possible shortcomings, therefore it needs a significant portion of budget. Other purposes of monitoring are: 

• ensuring that project outputs are being delivered on time, 
• ensuring that organisation and engagement processes are running rapidly, 
• checking the consumption of resources, 
• alerting the project team if some problem arises, 
• overcoming barriers. 

In this phase, the collection of existing and new data plays an important role; information must be accurate, reliable, timely and representative in order to analyse them.  

Outputs are easier to measure due to the fact that they are obtainable from the Action plan, whereas outcomes are more difficult to monitor since they are related to the objectives. For example, they could be: reduction of delivery times by improving access and route information, decrease of illegal parking and vehicle traffic on particular routes, improvement of air quality and incentive of rail transport. All these outcomes need a before-after analysis to evaluate the change such as freight traffic surveys and businesses and haulier surveys.  

Different types of measuring indicators exist: 

• Input indicators: the most important yardstick is the amount of money because it is indispensable to deliver the required outputs. 
• Output indicators: they estimate how effective the project has been in providing the outputs at each stage of the work. They include physical parameters but also measures of quality. 
• Process indicators: they consist of complicated flows of materials and information among different teams and they concern rates of progress and the efficiency of the communication and operation process. They highlight any delay, overrun or barrier. 

All these indicators are useful to track progress and to ensure that any problems are identified as soon as possible. In this way, it is possible to bring about corrective actions, avoiding further waste of time and resources.  

In addition to outputs and outcomes, there are also other yardsticks that allow to evaluate the achievement of FQP: 

• participation in the meetings,  
• raise of media interest in the partnership, 
• number of associations and organisations willing to get engaged, 
• number of spontaneous requests from companies to become involved, 
• growth of accesses to the website. 

Monitoring is a challenging activity so it could be helpful the following recommendations: 

• do not elaborate a system which requires notable resources because it is too much complicated, 
• use key indicators to avoid false information since they are frequently mandatory, 
• provide different indicators for key stakeholders and politicians because they judge the project from different points of view, 
• data and information collected must be disseminated in an accessible format,  
• if it is necessary, review the monitoring criteria.

Evaluations

After implementation and monitoring, there is the assessment phase in which the results previously obtained are used to evaluate the performance of the FQP established. Information analysed are both qualitative and quantitative and, to understand if the process is successful or not, it is decided whether key performance standards match with the starting objectives. These judgements are related to different aspects: 

• Relevance: did the project provide a good solution and ensure a good system performance? 
• Effectiveness: have all the aims been fully achieved? 
• Efficiency: were time and funding exploit properly without any waste? 
• Impact: what positive or negative consequences has the project had in each field? This includes accessibility, traffic, economic, environmental, social and safety impacts. 
• Sustainability: will the project contribute to sustainable transport over time? 

A good post-implementation evaluation allows to review the FQP whether something went not as planned and expected. It helps in: 

• identifying any constraints or bottlenecks that affected the project,
• assessing the actual benefits, 
• providing guidance on the strengths and weakness for future replications and improving future transport decision-making procedures, 
• identifying the extent to which the forecast aims have been realised. 

The process is articulated in five stages: 

1. Determination of the purpose of the assessment 
2. Planning of the evaluation 
3. Collection, control and archiving of data 
4. Analysis of data and comparison of results 
5. Presentation and diffusion of findings 

There are many methods to be used for the evaluation and they are divided in: 

• Cost-effectiveness analyses: they compare the costs of carrying out different option for achieving the same outcome that is fixed; only input costs vary.   
• Cost-Benefit analyses: they have the constrain that all the benefits can be monetarised and they evaluate the difference between all of them and all the costs, adding together.  
• Least cost planning: it is a particular type of Cost-Benefit analysis that contemplates two very different strategies for reaching the same goal. 
• Multi-criteria analyses: they can consider both quantitative and qualitative criteria and they may be used when some aspects cannot be monetarised. A thorny part includes the decision of what weight attribute to each criterion. 

Regardless of the method, it is essential that the project/action has been fully realized and will be operational for a sufficient period of time, otherwise benefits and costs cannot be assessed at best. The best time after implementation to carry out the evaluation depend upon the nature of the FQP. 

After an overview on Freight Quality Partnership and all its phases, the following chapter explains the step-by-step instructions to guide partners on FQP establishment and operations, including the documents and templates for succeeding.