Multicriteria group decision making for the third party reverse logistics service provider in the supply chain model using fuzzy TOPSIS for transportation services

Generally Supply Chain Management (SCM) research focuses on the forward movement of materials from the suppliers to the end consumer. However, the reverse flow of products from consumers to upstream businesses has not received much interest (Rogers and Tibben-Lembke, 2001; Simchi-Levi et al., 2003). Due to the revolution of green manufacturing aspect in the globalisation market, the reverse logistics concepts have become an important entity and play a pivotal role in a company's strategic decision. In real time situation, the collection of the returned products from the customer to manufacturer is complex and time consuming task. The separate logistics system has to be developed in order to inspect and maintain the collected returned products in the down stream management, which does not include disposition management, administration time and cost of converting unproductive returns into productive assets. This gives rise to the situation for outsourcing. Outsourcing has recently given many third party providers with a unique opportunity to enter the reverse logistics market. This paper proposes a structured, Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) model for evaluating and selecting the best third Party Reverse Logistics Provider (3PRLP) using the fuzzy-technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (Fuzzy-TOPSIS).