Selection of the 3rd/4th Party Logistics Provider

Logistics’ role in today’s global and competitive markets is critical for enterprises’ viability, since it can provide the grounds for firms to become leaders of the markets by simultaneously achieving performance maximization and cost minimization. Towards improving competitiveness and achieving their targets enterprises mostly paid attention to production and generally developing their core business. In a way to also achieve high performances in their logistics workload, enterprises often outsource non-core business, such as transportation, warehousing, et cetera. In this light, outsourcing has become lately a very common practice. However, nowadays there are numerous competitive firms that offer such services and decision-making towards selection of the most effective one is usually challenging. Towards this direction, a multi-criteria analysis approach has been developed for the selection of the optimal outsourcing strategy involving a number of service logistics providers. The approach follows the path of an outranking multi-criteria method, namely ELECTRE III. The approach is illustrated through two case studies.