یک روش ارزیابی برای خدمات لجستیک با استفاده از تئوری فازی، کیفیت توسعه عملکرد و برنامه ریزی هدف

Logistics customer service is an important factor in the success of supply chain management. The aim of this study is to propose a novel approach for customer service management. For the improvement of logistics service operations, the proposed method integrates quality function development (QFD), fuzzy extended analytic hierarchy process (FEAHP), and multi-segment goal programming (MSGP). The advantage of the method includes the consideration of various logistics goals and the flexibility of setting multi-aspiration levels of evaluation criteria.

Almost two decades ago, some studies had highlighted the significant role of logistics and customer service in achieving competitive advantage (Bailey, 1996). Since then, customer service has become increasingly important while brand advantage and the product’s technical characteristics are no longer the exclusive factors to attract customers. While directly related to customer service, logistics management aims to increase the operational efficiency by facilitating greater collaboration and coordination with business partners (Celebi, Bayraktar, & Bingol, 2010). Furthermore, as a global trend, outsourcing of the logistics function has become increasingly important that the logistics service providers (LSPs) have been well positioned to turn into the indispensable links in the chain of commerce. Whereas businesses need to expand the breadth of logistics services (Bottani & Rizzi, 2006), its design determines if the actual operations will ensure customer satisfaction and lifetime value. Therefore, understanding customers’ requirement for providing the right solution is essential. Same as physical products, customers evaluate service by comparing their perceptions with their expectations; therefore, a gap in between can be a synthetic measure of customer satisfaction (Bottani and Rizzi, 2006 and Robledo, 2001). This paper proposes a novel approach for designing the logistics customer service by integrating quality function development (QFD), fuzzy extended analytic hierarchy process (FEAHP) and multi-segment goal programming (MSGP). QFD is implemented as an analytical framework to integrate FEAHP and MSGP. FEAHP not only handles the inherent uncertainty of the human judgment, but also provides the flexibility for the decision makers to comprehend the problem-solving process. MSGP is devised to address the decision-making problem which involves multi-segment aspiration levels of evaluation criteria. The remainder of this paper is organized in the following order. Section 2 reviews the studies on logistics service for defining customer service requirements (CSRs) and logistics operation requirements (LORs) from the respective perspectives of customers and service providers. Section 3 introduces the basics of QFD, FEAHP and MSGP. Section 4 presents the procedure of the proposed method and Section 5 provides a practical case study to demonstrate its application. Section 6 provides the concluding remarks.

In an increasingly competitive business environment, a business needs to be innovative its operational system to satisfy customers. In this study, we review existing studies of logistics service for characterizing customer service requirements and logistics operation requirements. By considering both customer’s expectations and service provider’s perceptions, we take a novel approach for designing the logistics service system. We adopt quality function development (QFD) as the analytical framework to integrate the fuzzy extended analytic hierarchy process (FEAHP) and multi-segment goal programming (MSGP). Whereas FEAHP handles the inherent uncertainty of the human judgment and provides the flexibility to comprehend the problem-solving process, MSGP is able to address the multi-segment aspiration levels problems, which involves multiple objectives. To demonstrate the proposed model, we present a practical case of a logistics service company. The importance weights of evaluation criteria, resource limitations, and other design metrics can be incorporated into FEAHP and MSGP models, and the results of computation are aggregated into the QFD framework. In this way, various analytical methods can be conveniently integrated into the design process for real-world applications.