Multi-criteria decision aid model for transportation supplier selection: Case of a pharmaceutical supply chain

Transportation is a major logistical driver of supply chain performance as it is responsible for the flow of goods between each successive stages in a supply chain. It is, however, often outsourced to external providers to leverage more responsiveness or a higher efficiency. Therefore, it is mandatory to avoid any hiccups in this sourcing process and this begins by ensuring an appropriate selection of the transportation supplier that exceeds others with regards to specified sourcing objectives. This paper concerns the problem of transportation supplier selection in a supply chain. We introduce a new hybrid decision aid approach for transportation supplier selection, coupling Multi-Attribute Utility Theory and Analytical Hierarchy Process. This unified approach is based on transportation related attributes extracted from the literature. An application is provided to present how this approach is used to select the right transportation supplier in the case of a public pharmaceutical products supply chain.