A multicriteria decision making approach for defining strategies in logistics

The homogeneous nature of logistics providers’ services, characterized by low margins and price-sensitive customers, has pushed the market towards a commoditization of logistics services in the last decades. For this reason, the efforts towards the definition of innovative success factor for this industrial setting is significant to increase the logistics service marginality. However, current scientific studies related to Logistics Service Providers (LSPs) overlook the identification of operational success factors to increase business competitiveness and profitability, leaving logistics organizations with ambiguity when defining their operational strategies. Hence, this paper aims to identify crucial elements in the logistics sector, specifically in chemical transport and distribution. The approach involves first qualitative research of the main factors that increase the competitiveness of the LSPs’ service. The factors are evaluated and ranked by adopting the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology to identify the main elements that could influence the LSPs’ competitiveness. Once the ranking has been provided, the paper proposes a framework to properly choose a set of operational strategies for logistics organizations and an industrial application for chemical transport and distribution. The presented case study shows how to apply the methodology to a real-world instance of the logistics sector.