Nowadays, the demand of third-party logistics provider becomes an increasingly important issue for companies to improve their customer service and to decrease logistics costs. This paper presents an integrated fuzzy approach for the evaluation and selection of 3rd party logistics service providers. This method consists of two techniques: (1) use fuzzy analytic hierarchy process to identify weights of evaluation criteria; (2) apply fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method to evaluate and sequence alternatives and to make the final selection. Finally, an actual industrial application is performed in logistics department of a tire manufacturing company. For this, first, eight logistics supplier selection criteria were determined, and then the best alternative among seven logistics service provider companies was selected by the proposed method. 1. Introduction Logistics plays an important role in integrating the supply chain of industries. Because the market becomes more global, logistics is now seen as an important area where industries can decrease costs and improve their customer service quality [1]. Nowadays, many companies are searching to outsource their logistics operations to what they call as Third Party Logistics Service Providers (LSPs) to introduce products and service innovations quickly to their markets [2]. Therefore there is an increasing trend that manufacturing companies outsource their logistics activities to meet their increasing need for logistics services. This trend has increased importance of the concept of third party LSPs [3]. In today’s economic environment, many firms name third party LSPs as more qualified and economic in accomplishing their partial or all logistic requirements [4]. Outsourcing means that an organization hires an outside organization to provide a good or service that it traditionally had provided itself, because this third party is an “expert” in efficiently providing this good or service, while the organization itself may not be [5]. Because of development of supply chain partnerships, cost reduction, restructuring of the company, success of the firms using contract logistics, globalization, improvement of services, and efficient operations, companies need to outsource their logistics activities to 3PL service providers [6]. The outsourcing of logistics activities to third-party LSPs has now become a common practice. An LSP is defined as a provider of logistics services that performs the logistics functions on behalf of their clients [7]. The LSP selection is a
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