Abstract
In the past decades, despite considerable attention having been paid to third-party logistics (3PL) owing to its specialized service, sophisticated operation, and reduced cost, research on quantitative methods for estimating the efficiency of 3PL companies is still lacking, especially for those with small or medium scale. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to establish a quantitative evaluation method to measure the efficiency of the individual nongovernmental 3PL firms and explore the valuable information for the management of 3PL business with Apriori and K-means. Taking TopChains (an emerging nongovernmental 3PL company) as an example, the monthly supply and demand (S&D) level and matching degree were evaluated via the integrating data mining algorithm (i.e., Apriori and K-means) and TOPSIS entropy weight method based on historical data. The findings demonstrate that the S&D level varied with time and space, and the customer demand in February tended to reduce substantially. Besides, the outcome of S&D matching degree in June is undesirable, indicating the unsatisfactory efficiency in resource management. The evaluation maneuver stated in this study can serve as a valuable tool to measure individual nongovernmental 3PL enterprises’ efficiency in terms of S&D, and for reference, the results can aid in rational enterprise investment plan. Besides, this attempt broadened the direction of ARM and K-means being applied in the logistics field.
Highlights
Both the trend of economic globalization and the evolution of information technology have expanded the scope of production, sales, and circulation of commodities, which generates a larger logistics market, requiring more specialized and informative logistics service. e third-party logistics (3PL), launched in the U.S and Europe in the 1980s and focusing on the sophisticated logistics operation mode, can reduce the operating costs and enhance the service level, rapidly occupying the logistic market [1,2,3,4,5].1.1. 3PL Capacity and Efficiency
supply and demand (S&D) Level Analysis Based on K-Means. e result obtained in the first phase through the K-means algorithm illustrated that the level of demand and supply
It should be noted that little research used association rule mining (ARM) to deal with logistics expense data since it is marginally difficult to transform the data into the proper form due to the requirements of discretization for data, while this paper made it by ranking the original data and assigning the new values to them; with regard to the results of Apriori, a simple linear model was proposed to calculate the specific value of supply and demand, and the results provided source data for the TOPSIS entropy method
Summary
Both the trend of economic globalization and the evolution of information technology have expanded the scope of production, sales, and circulation of commodities, which generates a larger logistics market, requiring more specialized and informative logistics service. e third-party logistics (3PL), launched in the U.S and Europe in the 1980s and focusing on the sophisticated logistics operation mode, can reduce the operating costs and enhance the service level, rapidly occupying the logistic market [1,2,3,4,5].1.1. 3PL Capacity and Efficiency. Both the trend of economic globalization and the evolution of information technology have expanded the scope of production, sales, and circulation of commodities, which generates a larger logistics market, requiring more specialized and informative logistics service. E third-party logistics (3PL), launched in the U.S and Europe in the 1980s and focusing on the sophisticated logistics operation mode, can reduce the operating costs and enhance the service level, rapidly occupying the logistic market [1,2,3,4,5]. E capacity of logistics is generally summarized as the capacity to satisfy the needs of circulation of materials, associated with various processes, e.g., transporting, storage, and delivery, which can be measured by the relationship of the supply and demand. If supply is overwhelmed by demand, there will be an undesirable declination of the quality of logistics services, inducing the lack of efficiency in customer service. Due to the low industry threshold, many companies have entered into the 3PL market, leading to a fiercely competitive surrounding, while the overall capacity
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