Research on Evaluation of Transportation Carriers in Supply Chain Based on an Integrated Approach

The movement of materials has always been the main issue in supply chain management, transportation links all the members in the supply chain and fulfill the upmost objective of customer delivery. In order to realize quick response to customers´ requirement as well as delivery high-quality product, companies give up the traditional vertical integration structure by means of focusing on their core competency. Therefore, outsourcing strategy has become companies´ common choice. Among various outsourcing activities, transportation is the most typical item. In this paper, an example company is studied in order to find a good way to evaluate and select proper transportation carriers and furthermore to distribute delivery demand among them with reasonable proportion. In the process of transportation carrier selection, an integrated approach with Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Linear Programming (LP) is utilized. The AHP method helps to convert human evaluations to numerical values that can be processed and compared over the entire range of the problem. Meanwhile, Linear Programming determines the way to achieve the best combination of company´s outsourcing requirement.