An AHP/DEA Methodology for 3PL Vendor Selection in 4PL

Vendor selection is an important and complex problem, which contains many criteria. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) can be very useful in reaching a likely result which can satisfy the subjective opinion of the decision maker or the evaluation team. On the other hand, the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) can select vendors objectively with the quantitative data. In this paper, a four-step model based on both AHP and DEA is formulated and applied to a case study. The use of the proposed model can give precise evaluation combining the subjective opinion from the decision makers with the objective data of the relevant factors. In other words, this approach can add subjective factors to the evaluation without losing the objective precision of the selection.