Improving the logistic process of orders dispatching through a multi-criteria decision-making perspective

Far from being a mere production-oriented mission, competition among companies has to be considered as a much wider concept, largely based on effective supply chain management. Implementing suitable supply chain strategies is indeed crucial for enterprises seeking to strengthen their own position in the market against their competitors. With this recognition, one of the main issue in the logistic field is the suppliers and orders management, that is a complex decision-making problem depending on a wide set of aspects mutually correlated and often conflicting each other. This is the reason why assuming a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) perspective is useful to deal with the topic of interest. In particular, the present paper is aimed at sorting out a real world case study about distributing and dispatching orders, through a MCDM approach based on the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). On the one hand, this method is proposed to prioritise the vehicles used to transfer orders, by taking into account criteria such as pallet capacity, tailgate presence, energy type and so on. On the other hand, a final ranking of orders to be delivered will be achieved under the evaluation of aspects such as loading/unloading time, kind of vehicle and driver, among others. Final results will be helpful to establish a degree of priority in assigning orders to vehicles and their robustness will be checked by performing a sensitivity analysis on criteria weights.