Study of Evaluation and Selection on Third Party Reverse Logistics Providers

Two of the most significant problems of our era are the depletion of the natural energy and resources and the pollution caused from the disposal of waste end-of-life products. An effective reverse logistics (RL) operation can help organizations make good use of nature energy and resources and take healthy balance between economy and environment. Thereby RL has emerged as one of the most rapidly evolving research fields in the past few years. Reverse logistics is actually very involved and can be extremely complex. Many companies with limited resources outsource their reverse logistics operation needs to third-party providers. This paper firstly present a decision model for enterprises performing RL activities. After that, the paper creates an evaluation index system for selecting a 3PRL provider, and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is applied to calculate the objective weights. On the basis of this, an evaluation model is built to evaluate 3PRL providers by using the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation methodology, and an example demonstrates the model´s efficiency.