Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to efficiently assist the decision makers in evaluating and selecting the most appropriate third-party logistics (3PL) provider from environmental sustainability perspective using a two-phase model based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) and analytic network process (ANP).
Design/methodology/approach
The study uses an integrated approach of DEA and ANP as an evaluation and selection methodology to select an efficient and requisite 3PL. The integrated model is a sound technique for 3PL evaluation and selection. DEA effectively screens the maximally efficient 3PLs, whereas ANP easily performs the cumbersome process of weighting diverse criteria and ranks various alternatives according to their performance on the basis of these criteria. This study lists the prominent evaluation and selection criteria taking into consideration the environmental sustainability. Finally, a real-life industrial application is presented to demonstrate the proposed method.
Findings
The current research work is devoted to the emerging research topic of environmental sustainability in logistics industry and supply chain management. The results of study indicate that eco-efficient transportation and 3PLs lead better transportation planning, better inventory and warehouse management, lower inventory cost and sustainable supply chain operations. Also, the applied approach enables the decision makers to better understand the complex relationships of the relevant criteria in the decision-making process.
Research limitations/implications
This study does not investigate the relationships between environmental performances and differentiation advantage from the perspective of 3PLs. Also, sensitivity analysis is not performed.
Practical implications
The developed integrated model enables decision analysts to better understand the complete evaluation process of 3PL evaluation and selection considering environmental sustainability perspective. Furthermore, the developed approach provides a more flexible, simple, accurate, effective, and systematic decision support tool for 3PL evaluation and selection.
Originality/value
The current study is first of its kind to use the integrated approach in evaluation and selection of 3PLs from environmental sustainability perspective considering the inter-dependencies among the evaluation and selection criteria.
Landfill site selection is a complex process, which requires the evaluation of multiple criteria. Decision-makers often face difficulties in taking the right decision in a multiple attribute environment. In this paper, an integrated fuzzy-analytical hierarchy process (AHP)-the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS)-based methodology was applied to the municipal solid waste (MSW) landfill site selection problem. To demonstrate the approach taken, a real case of Mumbai city is taken. The model was developed to suit the socioeconomic and regulatory setup. The fuzzy-analytic hierarchy process was used to make pairwise comparisons of criteria to assign weights and rank them, while F-TOPSIS was employed to rank the alternatives. It was found that the fuzzy-AHP-TOPSIS-based methodology can be a powerful guiding tool for MSW management planners. With this modeling approach, the accuracy of landfill site selection procedure can be significantly enhanced as compared to the traditional methods, thereby reducing the cost and time required. The developed methodology helps in representing and analyzing the uncertainty and error in the decision making process of landfill site selection.
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