DO IT RIGHT ONCE! THE STUDY ON SELECTION OF COLD CHAIN LOGISTICS SERVICE PROVIDERS BASED ON A HYBRID AHP-VIKOR MODEL

With improving living standard and consumer awareness, there is also increasing demand for cold chain logistics. However, current cold chain logistics is not as technologically advanced and popular as expected. Great losses and damages have been caused during cold chain logistics each year, which also represent heavy losses for enterprises. Therefore, these enterprises have to partner with reliable cold chain logistics service providers in order to effectively increase their profits from the third profit source. However, subject to increasingly fiercer competition among industries, enterprises have been seeking new profit sources to improve their competitiveness. Now the logistics industry in China has become a new profit source. It has become an effective way for enterprises to reduce their costs by controlling logistics activities. In addition, partnering with third-party logistics service providers to manage logistics activities has also become one of the effective solutions of enterprises to reduce their costs. In developing cities subject to less developed cold chain technologies, many small and medium-sized supermarkets, due to their own or external factors, are coping with tougher cold chain problems. This study aimed at, based on a hybrid AHP-VIKOR model, finding out how to identify reliable third-party cold chain logistics service providers, by taking the cold chain logistics services required for frozen foods of small and medium-sized supermarkets in China for example. Research result is expected to provide a reference for enterprises in selecting reliable third-party cold chain logistics service providers. Empirical results show that good service quality, appropriate price, reputation, and crisis management are critical to cold chain logistics, by incorporating the views of scholars engaging in researches on cold chain logistics and people who provide and receive cold chain logistics services in the establishment and assignment of cold chain logistics evaluation index system. Further, cold chain coverage and related technologies are also critical to cold chain logistics. © 2021, Chinese Society for Quality. All rights reserved.