No abstract

Taiwan's automotive industry has undergone tremendous changes during the past decades as a result of joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2002. This membership has affected the operating costs and the competitive advantage of automotive companies. The selection of an effective logistics service provider is a key strategy to reinforce competitiveness. This type of selection is a multi-attributes decision-making problem that includes both qualitative and quantitative attributes. This study presents a comprehensive methodology for evaluating a lead logistics provider (LLP). The evaluation of an LLP is the precondition and foundation of logistics operation; it is the important task of choosing the best logistics service provider for logistics management. The proposed methodology consists of 2 parts: (a) using a decision-making analysis framework to structure the objective hierarchy and to identify the evaluation attributes; and (b) applying the simple multi-attribute rating technique-rank order centric (SMART-ROC) method to drive the weights by ranking and rating. After they are identified, the evaluation attributes are used to construct a SMART model. This SMART model is subsequently applied for the final evaluation of a provider, as demonstrated in the case study presented here. The results of this case study indicate that quality is the most important criterion for the user and the provider companies because this factor influences the final evaluation process. The proposed method also enables decision makers to understand the complex relationships between relevant attributes, thereby improving the reliability of their decisions.

The increasing competition due to globalization and e-Business development has stimulated manufacturers to pursue supply chain alliances more aggressively. The primary motivation for this is to minimize overall costs and gain mutual benefits through supplier-manufacturer integration. Supply chain alliance is one of the key strategic co-operations adopted by manufacturers to simultaneously reduce costs and improve service. The advancement of supply chain alliance is moving from a Third-Party Logistics System to a Lead Logistics Provider Management System. The Lead Logistics Provider plays the role of logistics manager who lead the logistics operations across the entire supply chain with the ability to provide superior expertise in transportation services, warehousing capabilities, information technology, and materials replenishment among the other logistics activities. A Lead Logistics Provider system framework is composed of three components that include Resources Management, Information Central System, and Logistics Synchronization. This study presents a case of a Taiwanese automotive supply chain illustrating the application of supply chain alliances via the Lead Logistics Provider system. Significant improvement on inventory costs and improvement on the transportation performance is reported resulting from the application of this system. This scheme also showed enhanced service quality that creates business opportunities among the supply chain partners.