Evaluation research on performance of Chinese agri-food cold-chain logistics company

Food security concerns are drawing more and more attention in Chinese society. As one of the most effective way for improving food quality and safety, how to promote logistics ability of the Cold-Chain enterprise has become an emergency issue. This paper aims to build a performance evaluation system for the cold-chain company based on the Chinese agri-food industry to analyze its strengths and weaknesses for improving its competitiveness. Improved Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation methods are blended to evaluate the performance of the target company in three steps. In the first step, rely on the AHP, with the literature review and the theory of the balanced score card method, the determination of evaluation criteria and the hierarchical structure of the evaluation index system are done. In the second step, the weights of each criterion are obtained through improved AHP and then an agri-food cold-chain logistics enterprises performance evaluation index system will be built. And, in the third step, the Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation method is used to evaluate the performance of the target company with the performance evaluation index system. Finally, a demonstration of the numerical example in Chinese agri-food industry is presented for better understanding. The proposed performance evaluation index system can assist managers to comprehensive comprehend the strengths and weaknesses of their agri-food cold-chain companies and could continuously improve the relevant cold-chain performance factors from the practice.