Technology Acceptance Model in Evaluation of Telematics Technologies Utilization in Road Transportation

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the acceptance and the utilization of GPS/GPRS-based telematics technology in road transport companies registered in Poland. Telematics technologies are essential for management of energy saving and emissions reduction in road transport. It is in line with the European Union policy of sustainable transportation. The evaluation is based on a survey designed and carried out in 2020. The issues concerning the scope of telematics systems utilization as well as the internal and external factors affecting their use are analysed. The methodology is based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). The results are checked for robustness. Based on the results, it can be reasoned that as a result of the COVID19 pandemic, the companies started to use telematics systems more widely than they did before. Furthermore, the companies employing more people recognize the higher usefulness of telematics systems and are motivated to have the systems more than smaller enterprises; however, TAMs estimated separately for small and medium-sized enterprises did not reveal any significant differences in the parameter estimates.

certain degree, including but not limited to supporting transport and management processes. That is why another survey was designed and carried out in 2020. It was aimed to answer the question concerning the scope of telematics systems utilisation and the internal and external factors affecting their use. Internal factors mean the factors that originate from the company, while the external ones are the stimuli from the company's environment. As a result of COVID19 pandemic, many companies shifted to remote work and all parties: contractors, clients, and clerks have got used to electronic documents. That is why the scale of using systems integrated with telematics systems in road transport has increased significantly. Still, the answer to whether internal factors provided sufficient support for the use of telematics-management tools will be possible only after analysis.
The terminology used in the study resulted from the structure of the Technology Acceptance Model [8], (TAM). It enables the identification of the cause-and-effect relationships between the perceived usability and the ease of telematics systems' use, as well as the attitude towards the use and the actual use. The possibility of identifying direct and indirect cause-and-effect relationships and extending the model with subsequent factors that affect the telematics systems use are the advantage of the TAM.
Regarding the fact that most road transport companies are micro-companies or small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the assumption was made in the study that the discussed cause-and-effect relationships can depend on the company size. According to research on SMEs, it can be assumed that due to limited resources there are significant differences in SMEs management methods compared to big companies that most management theories apply to [9][10]. An important indication comes from the findings reported by Turner, Ledwith and Kelly [11]. They examined 118 respondent companies, divided into micro-companies and SMEs, and hi-tech, low-tech, and service industries.
They found that companies of all sizes spend roughly the same proportion of their turnover on projects, but the smaller the company, the smaller its projects are, and the less it uses project management and its tools. Strangely enough, hi-tech companies spend less on projects than low-tech or service companies, but have more extensive projects and use project management to a greater extent.
Taking these findings into account and implementing the road transport industry's characteristics, we assumed that micro and small transport enterprises are less likely to benefit from telematics systems due to lower knowledge of their application in transport activity management. Therefore we implemented the enterprise sizes in the Technology Acceptance Model.
Our paper contributes to the existing literature in the novel way of examining the degree of telematics integrated technologies acceptance and utilisation by road transport enterprises registered in Poland but operating in the entire Europe. To the best of our knowledge, there is no similar research in any publications. Typically a single user (an individual) is asked to demonstrate or compare their motivation to use a given application. Here, we focus on the enterprise's management level. Thus managers are responsible for using telematics devices and integrated packages for the operational management of the company. So an enterprise was defined as a microunit. We do not consider any particular product. We analyse how much the enterprises realise that they benefit from this Preprints (www.preprints.org) | NOT PEER-REVIEWED | Posted: 1 April 2021 doi:10.20944/preprints202104.0002.v1 kind of support. Since Polish road transport sector (along with the German and British ones) is among the most significant transport stakeholders in Europe and has the newest generation of trucks and semitrailers, the findings and conclusions can be easily extended [12]. Another incentive to take advantage of the new solutions is that the questionnaires were collected during the first phase of COVID19 pandemic. New organisational and legal circumstances contributed to an increase in the popularity of hi-tech devices. In the study, we examined 500 enterprises which responded to the questions in June-July, 2020.

Materials and Methods
In 1985 Davis presented The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) concept [8]. It was based on the assumption that a decision about using new information technology is the user's behavioural reaction that can be explained or even predicted based on the user's motivation; the motivation is in turn affected directly by external stimuli resulting from the technology's current features and capabilities, the user's characteristics and organisational factors [13]. The technology acceptance is meant as a will, demonstrated in the users' group, to use the information technology in order to implement the tasks that the technology was designed to support [14].
Based on these assumptions, Davis extended his conceptual model to the version shown in Figure 1.  The original model developed by Davis in 1985 has been subjected to many transformations and extensions. Venkatesh and Davis [13], proposed the TAM2 model, which provided a more accurate and detailed explanation of the reasons why some users accepted the use of the particular system or technology in relation to time, namely before the implementation, one month after the implementation and three months after the implementation.
Venkatesh and Bala [16], combined TAM2 and the Perceived Ease of Use determinants model [17]  Nordhof S. et al. [24], reported on the study of social acceptance for using partially automated and autonomous passenger vehicles. A survey was carried out in a population of 9,118 drivers in eight European countries. 71.06% of the respondents decided that partially automated cars are easy to drive, and 28.03% of the study participants intend to buy an automated car when it is available. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) was used to investigate the effects of the capacity and expected effort, social impact, facilitating factors and hedonic motivation on the behavioural intention to use partially automated vehicles.
Recently, Yang et al. [25], have proposed an integrated technology acceptance model to investigate the factors which affect drivers' intention to use mobile navigation applications, which can also apply to road transport. The study was carried out on a population of 384 drivers. The vital element included optimising mobile applications by programmers so that apps did not distract the driver's attention while driving a vehicle.

TAM in assessment of telematics acceptance by road transport enterprises
In the paper, we constructed The Technology Acceptance Model and proposed its modification taking into account the original Davis's motivation. As we decided to study the companies from the road transport sector, we assumed that our targets are defined as these companies' managers and owners. Thus, we can assume that they possess broader knowledge than the users of the typically employed systems in these companies. So the model construction was projected at the management level. Therefore the Perceived Use was defined as the Perceived Usefulness of information coming from telematics systems for the operational management of the transport processes observed in the company.
Consequently, the Perceived Use (PU) latent variable was described by Previous studies [6][7] revealed that enterprises applied telematics systems to track vehicle routes. Other advantages of the system included the determination of the drivers' working time in a given 24-hour driving period, analysing whether the driver will be able to arrive at the destination within the pre-determined time slot for loading or unloading, analysing weekly and bi-weekly periods, compatibility of telematics systems with cargo exchanges and client applications, and compatibility with other onboard devices, e.g. refrigeration units.
Recently, when the COVID19 pandemic has changed the reality, entrepreneurs became aware that telematics offers more than truck tracing. That is why the study can be treated as reliable because the managers realised the advantages of the system. One issue needs to be explained, though. The enterprises use telematics systems for different periods, ranging from several months to several years. We assumed that they reported the system's usefulness as they had assessed it for the survey time. In order to prepare the Technology Acceptance Model for telematics, we developed a survey questionnaire.
The respective questions are described in the Appendix A.

Data characterictics
Preprints (www.preprints.org) | NOT PEER-REVIEWED | Posted: 1 April 2021 doi:10.20944/preprints202104.0002.v1 The survey, aimed to identify the factors of telematics technology acceptance, was conducted in June-July, 2020 among 500 randomly selected road transport enterprises that carry goods using the CATI method. The surveyed units were defined for the material criterion, i.e. enterprises providing road transport services, and territorial criterion, i.e. enterprises whose business activity is registered in Poland. The survey was carried out based on a sample of enterprises from the databases of the members of the Association of International Road Carriers in Poland. Consequently, the enterprises were selected from a population of 4,500 companies. The fact that decision-makers took part in the study (they were managers competent in the scope of the answers provided) was a vital aspect of the study. The number of 500 respondents was determined by the statistical assumption that the maximum error rate in the estimation would not exceed 5% [26]. The structure of the sample is presented in Table I. The data presented in Table 1 reveal that the sample of 500 enterprises selected for the study roughly reflects the structure of transport enterprises providing domestic and international transport services, in line with the data presented in the report GITD [27], .
An analysis of the survey data revealed that all enterprises participating in the survey had vehicles with telematics systems installed. In total, all surveyed enterprises owned 24,975 vehicles, 97.3% of which were equipped with a telematics system (24,304 vehicles).
Enterprises used a wide range of different telematics products, such as Tom Tom (20%), Navi Expert (17%), MIX Telematics (13%), Fleetmatics (13%), however no significant dominance of any product was observed. statistics for PEU and PU are much higher than the recommended value of 0.7, which means very good scale reliability [28]. The CA statistics values are higher than the required level, only for the ATU variable the value of the statistics is slightly lower. Still, the difference is small and amounts to ca. 6% of the recommended value. That is why the ATU variable was included further in the analysis. Based on the results obtained for the extended TAM it can be reasoned that the companies that employ more people (EMP) recognise higher usefulness of telematics systems (PU) and are motivated to have the systems (ATU) more than smaller enterprises. The results comply with the authors' intuition and experience in the field.

A. Measurement constructs in the TAM model
However, TAMs estimated for small and medium-sized enterprises did not reveal any significant differences in the parameter estimates. The only major difference in the parameter evaluation for both groups was observed for the PU → ATU relationship and amounted to 0.131 (0.437-0.306 difference). The calculated statistics t = 1.316 (p = 0.188) does not allow for evaluating the difference as statistically significant [32]. It is the stability of the parameter estimates across the samples used in research that matters.
The CMIN/DF statistics values lower than 2, IFI higher than 0.95, and RMSEA less than 0.05 are a testimony of a perfect adaptation of the models to the data [28]. Only for models based on subgroups defined by the number of employees, the value of the RMSEA coefficient is slightly higher. For both groups, it is lower than 0.055, so it confirms that the model is well fitted to the data.

Robustness check
Despite the correct statistics confirming the model's quality, the results were additionally verified. A bootstrap procedure using the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator was employed to re-estimate the model parameters. The procedure was used for the model estimated based on the total sample. The bootstrap based on 5,000 samples helped calculate the parameter bias and standard errors of the biases, and determine the bias-corrected confidence intervals of 95% [33]. The results for internal TAMs are summarised in Table IV. non-biased. The parameter bias value is assumed as statistically insignificant when the standard bias error is greater than the bias itself (absolute value) [34].

Discussion
The Technology Acceptance Model is a useful analytical tool for telematics technology acceptance by the road transport sector for two reasons. Toward Using (ATU) is statistically insignificant, which may be attributed to the fact that business entities have been using ICT technologies for quite a long time, and their scope has been extending gradually. Hence, the Perceived Ease of Use may slightly lose its significance versus the Perceived Usefulness as the factor that determines the use of the enterprise's telematics system. Adequate service and support for the institution implementing the system may significantly mitigate the potential difficulty. An analysis of the sensitivity of the results confirmed their stability and reliability.
As was mentioned in the introduction, the area and level of telematics systems application were the subject of previous research carried out in 2019 among road transport companies [7]. The scope and level of telematics solutions advancement in road transport companies were analysed in the research for the barriers to their using and clients' requirements. The results suggested that the barriers to using telematics devices are strongly related to the contractors' requirements, which is linked to the scope of the devices' use by road transport companies. An increase in the scope of telematics device use contributed to a rise in the added value in the enterprises. The pandemic conditions completely changed the attitude to telematics systems and forced moving many operations to ICT platforms often based on remote solutions. It can be regarded as a positive effect of the pandemic, considered in terms of the Shumpeterian 'creative destruction' [35]. Such solutions seem to be long-lasting, which will cause a significant change in the manager's approach to the employed solutions in a long-term perspective. As Contractor [36], argues after the pandemic business is facing implementing better information-gathering systems, 5G surveillance and monitoring, blockchain and other integration of vendor-buyer computer systems. Looking closer into the European environment, after Brexit the changing transport requirements promote the long-lasting use of the reference solutions [37]. For these reasons the final conclusion is that enterprises using telematics systems are subject of both advantages for vehicle tracing and operational management in the enterprise and external incentives caused by supply chains requirements and unexpected shocks.

Conclusions
This study's subject matter focused on assessing the acceptance level of Data Availability Statement: if the article is published, the data will be made available from the Nicolaus Copernicus University Repository

Conflicts of Interest:
The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.