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The purpose of this paper is to develop a combined intuitionistic fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (IFAHP) and fuzzy multi-objective optimization approach to select suppliers and allocate the orders to them in the bottled water production context.

First, the primary weights of criteria associated with the supplier selection problem are calculated using the IFAHP technique. Then a fuzzy multi-objective optimization model is developed to allocate the appropriate amount of orders to each supplier.

The proposed methodology has been successfully implemented in the case of an Iranian food company in its bottled water factory. Results demonstrate our model is capable of practically handling the uncertainty in DMs’ preference that leads to effective and efficient supplier selection and order allocation decisions.

The authors develop a novel hybrid decision-making tool to tackle the uncertainty in decision-makers’ opinions with a demonstrated applicability and some promising outcomes in efficiently allocating the order quantity to suppliers in the area of bottled water production.

The purpose of this paper is to assist ocean container carriers in their service quality improvement strategies to ensure breakthrough performance in India.

A total of seven container carriers have been involved in this study. To explore the list of service criteria, reviews of transportation literature, customer satisfaction survey questionnaires of container carriers, SERVQUAL battery, telephonic interviews and focus groups were conducted. For data collection, a shipper satisfaction questionnaire was administered. After data collection, a mean score analysis using SPSS 15 was taken up to assess the present service performance levels of the select container carriers. Then a performance gap analysis was carried out using the gap analysis formula found in the benchmarking literature.

Out of the 48 service criteria which decide the service quality of ocean container carriers, Maersk is the top performer in respect of 23 criteria, both Hanjin and MSC are top in eight criteria each, Evergreen is top in five criteria, APL is top in four criteria and CMA CGM is top in two criteria. Hapag has not scored top in any of the criteria. The gap analysis shows that APL needs to improve 44 areas in which it has shown negative gaps, CMA CGM needs to improve 47 criteria, Evergreen 45 criteria, Hanjin 47 criteria, Hapag 48 criteria, Maersk 40 criteria and MSC 43 criteria to become excellent.

This paper has enabled container carriers to understand the list of criteria that decide their service quality in the Indian container carrier industry. It has also informed them of their present service performance levels, and their areas of strengths and weakness. This will help them in efficient resource allocation. Understanding the areas and sizes of negative gaps, they can take appropriate steps to close them and become excellent.

This is the first service quality improvement study undertaken in the Indian container carrier industry and it has opened up enormous scope for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to assist ocean container carriers in devising effective marketing strategies to attract and retain Indian shippers by letting them understand the list of criteria Indian shippers use in the carrier selection decisions and also the amount of importance they assign to each criterion during such decisions.

To explore the criteria, review of transportation literature, customer satisfaction survey questionnaires of container carriers and SERVQUAL battery was undertaken. Telephonic interviews and focus group interview were also conducted for this purpose. In order to evaluate the criteria, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was used. In the AHP, the pairwise comparisons were carried out by another focus group with the help of a questionnaire. For AHP calculations, the Expert Choice 11.5 software was used.

Indian shippers use 45 criteria in the container carrier selection process and out of these, low freight is ranked as the most important criterion and pricing flexibility is the second most important one. In the list, these are the only two criteria found to be with more than 10 per cent importance. The least importance is given to five criteria: gifts and compliments, online booking, physical facilities, professional appearance and trade announcements which are weighed with 0.10 per cent importance. The paper has explored and added several new carrier selection criteria to the existing transportation literature.

The paper enables container carriers to understand various criteria Indian shippers use in the container carrier selection decisions along with their relative importance in such decisions. It also helps container carriers to decide which criterion is to be given priority and which not while devising their marketing strategies for Indian market. This decision is vital to maximize shippers' satisfaction.

The paper is the first ever carrier selection study undertaken in India and is expected to open up enormous scope for future research.

Ground-handling services are important for effective aircraft operations in the air transportation system. Airlines often outsource these services to ground-handling agents through business-to-business (B2B) marketing decisions. Therefore, this paper aims to address the problem of ground-handling agent selection in the airline industry.

A real-world case study was carried out to demonstrate the applicability of the integrated best worst method and fuzzy multi-attribute ideal real comparative analysis (F-MAIRCA) approach to solve ground-handling agent selection problems under uncertainty and imprecision. A two-stage sensitivity analysis was also conducted to ensure the credibility and validity of the application.

In the weighting stage, “Quality” was determined as the most important criterion in terms of supplier performance. With regard to the performance of the ground-handling agents, A2 was found as the optimal supplier in terms of both credibility and validity.

This study enumerated several criteria that ground-handling agents must meet in order to effectively supply services for the airlines. In addition, this study provides a novel framework from which managers can gain additional benefits from their businesses. Finally, it is concluded that this approach will help airline managers quantitatively in choosing the most appropriate ground-handling agent.

The contributions of this study to the existing literature are twofold. First, we propose a novel multiple attribute decision-making approach to address the problem of supplier selection for airlines under uncertainty and imprecision. Second, the selection of ground-handling agents from the B2B perspective is addressed for the first time in literature.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a structured model for the selection of a third‐party reverse logistics provider (3PRLP) under fuzzy environment for the battery industry, which establishes the relative weights for attributes and sub‐attributes.

This paper uses fuzzy extent analysis to solve the 3PRLP selection problem.

Owing to growing environmental legislations, reverse logistics (RL) has attained more importance among practitioners and academicians. The important decision related to RL is whether the company should maintain the separate RL system or whether it can be outsourced. RL takes 12 times as many steps to process returns as it does to manage outbound logistics (Accenture supply chain management practice), consequently many companies decided to outsource the RL activities or functions through 3PRLPs. The paper proposes a way of selecting the best 3PRLP using fuzzy extent analysis.

Fuzzy extent analysis is a highly multi‐faceted methodology which requires more numerical calculations and increases the time to take a decision. A limitation of this work is that in this study only fuzzy extent analysis has been concentrated on and other multi‐criteria decision‐making methods such as VIKOR, TOPSIS and ELECTRE can be applied in a fuzzy environment for solving such problems.

In this research, seven attributes and 34 sub‐attributes are considered and the interpretation of RL attributes in terms of their pair‐wise comparisons has been carried out. Those attributes possessing lower priorities in the fuzzy extent analysis need to be taken care of on a selection of the best 3PRLP.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the essential barrier and reveal the priority among common barriers to offshore wind energy in an Indian context with the assistance of the proposed framework.

Based on the proposed framework, a five-phase methodology was adapted to explore the essential barrier step by step. The common barriers, which were collected from the existing literatures through a systematic review, were further validated by field experts. The collected common barriers were evaluated with the assistance of the case industry’s field professionals through an analytical hierarchy process, a multi-criteria decision-making tool, to evaluate the barriers to Indian offshore wind energy.

Among the 12 common barriers to offshore wind energy, it is clear that “high capital cost” is the most essential barrier involved in the implementation of offshore wind energy farms in the Indian context.

This study reveals the importance of offshore wind power as a long-term profitable strategy to the case company within the Indian context. By addressing the essential barriers to the implementation of offshore wind farms, the Indian offshore wind system managers can train their employees to counteract the hindrances through the benchmarking of pioneering global offshore wind power developers such as Denmark and the UK. Further, this study provides useful suggestions to the Indian Government regarding policies for offshore wind energy; it also clearly projects the current status of the Indian offshore wind farm implementation.

This study assists Indian key stakeholders of offshore wind energy by indicating the essential barrier in an Indian context; they can remove the particular barrier instead of focusing on others that previous studies have identified. Further, this study brings out the importance of offshore wind power in an Indian context, which can urge stakeholders to invest more in offshore wind farms.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a structured model for evaluating and selecting the best third party reverse logistics provider (3PRLP) under fuzzy environment for the battery industry.

In this paper, the multi‐criteria decision‐making tools such as analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) are adopted to solve the problem of selection of 3PRLP.

In a real‐time situation, collecting the returned products from the customer end to the manufacturer end becomes more tedious, time consuming work and also it makes the information flow in the supply chain management more complex. A separate logistics system has to be developed in order to inspect and maintain the collected returned products in the down stream management. This current scenario encourages the top‐level management to seek for an alternative for collecting the returned products instead of making their supply chain structure to be complex. This gives rise to the term called 3PRLP. The 3PRLP will collect the returned products, inspect them and categorize them according to the various reverse logistics operations. A key finding of this work is a model to determine the best 3PRLP for the battery industry.

This work provides a useful decision model for practicing managers and researchers within this area, and also shows the various relationships, and processes the information required for the management involved in the selection of a reverse logistics provider under fuzzy environment.

In this research, seven attributes and 34 sub‐attributes are considered and an interpretation of reverse logistics attributes in terms of their pair‐wise comparisons has been carried out. Attributes possessing lower priorities in the AHP and FAHP need to be taken care on a selection of best 3PRLP.

In recent years, the business of container lines has faced severe challenges such as overcapacity and low profitability. To survive in such a competitive market, container lines need to maintain long-term customer relationships by enhancing the satisfaction and loyalty of customers. The purpose of this paper is to adopt a social exchange theory (SET) approach and investigate the impact of relational bonding strategies on the satisfaction and loyalty of customers in container shipping.

Drawing on SET, a theoretical model that specifies the relationships between relational bonding strategies, customer satisfaction and loyalty was proposed. Survey data were collected from 175 freight forwarders. The obtained data were analyzed using structural equation modelling.

The results indicate that financial bonding strategies have the most significant direct effects on customer satisfaction, while social bonding strategies have the strongest direct impact on customer loyalty. Financial bonding strategies, on the other hand, have the strongest total effects on customer loyalty. Intermodal and basic operations are found to have the equal total effects on customer loyalty.

By identifying the most effective relational bonding strategies for enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty, this study’s findings allow container lines to better allocate their resources and implement effective relational marketing policies to satisfy and retain their customers.

This research analyses and validates the determinants of customer satisfaction and loyalty from a relational lens and empirically contributes to the field of relational marketing in the container shipping industry.

The purpose of this paper is to present a research model that explore strategic outsourcing practices for sustainable competitive advantages. In this paper, a decision support system (DSS) for sustainable performance measurement of carry and forward agents (CFAs) is proposed.

The importance of seven criteria as a means of selecting the best CFA for warehouses under the aspect of sustainable environment is analyzed. The criteria are compared and ranked using analytic hierarchy process (AHP) with the combined assistance of literature review and expert opinions. This study makes use of unstructured interviews of Regional Distribution Manager and senior strategic leaders of the firms.

This paper discusses how strategic outsourcing can help firm to achieve desired business outcomes. The selection of best CFA gives a direction to the company to move toward excellence and provides the key areas to work upon to achieve competitive advantage. The main contribution of this paper includes modeling the performance evaluation problem within the context of a sustainable supply chain based on triple bottom line (TBL) concept.

The identified selection criteria are bound with Indian transportation and logistics industry. Further, it is suggested to conduct a real-life application of this study to other companies from different countries, to obtain criteria based on globally acceptable norms. The results may yield the network-specific evaluation criteria and their evaluations.

The developed excel-based tool could be used to record the inspection data, compare the CFAs and determine the best CFAs on the basis of selected criteria. With the help of this tool, CFAs know their position and ranking among all the CFAs and the focus areas they need to work upon to perform well. The training module could be used to keep the CFA staff on the right track which is very essential in a typical manufacturing industry warehouse. The improved performance of CFAs will in turn help to improve the manufacturing process, thus maximizing the gains along with environmental benefits.

This paper provides a priority of sustainable issues for evaluating the performance of the best CFA. The paper presents a strategic outsourcing model, which suggest both theoretical and managerial implications showing how to implement successful outsourcing practices in the global market by analyzing the performance of outsourcing partners, i.e. CFAs.

The objective of this paper is to propose a new data envelopment analysis (DEA) model for assessing sustainability of suppliers with partial impacts between inputs, desirable outputs and undesirable outputs.

This paper examines partial impacts of inputs on desirable and undesirable outputs and applies weak disposability assumption to propose a novel DEA model to determine the sustainability of suppliers.

This paper shows the type of resource sharing in DEA models and takes into account sustainable development and sustainability assessment concepts for sustainable supplier selection problem and develops a DEA model for selecting the most sustainable suppliers with partial sharing of resources. To select the most sustainable suppliers, this model helps managers to consider aggregate efficiency, overall efficiency and bundle efficiency. The paper introduces the supplier which is efficient at all levels as the most sustainable supplier.

For the first time, this paper suggests a new DEA model by partial impact between inputs and good outputs/bad outputs for selecting sustainable supplier and deals with the situations in which each supplier has several subunits. The new model calculates aggregate efficiency, overall efficiency and subunit efficiency of supplier. paper introduces the supplier which is efficient in all levels including aggregate efficiency, overall efficiency and subunit efficiency as the best supplier.