Diagnosis of physical conditions for the implementation of a reverse logistics management model in a supply chain

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to examine the influence of supply chain sustainability on performance of companies in the oil industry in Kenya with an aim of making recommendations on proper use of supply chain sustainability strategies. The study aimed at establishing how reverse logistics management, information technology adoption, early vendor involvement and green procurement adoption influences performance of companies in the oil industry. To achieve this, the study reviewed both theoretical and empirical literature and proposed the research methodology that addressed the gaps identified in literature as well as answer the stipulated research questions.Methodology: This research study adopted a descriptive research design approach targeting procurement staff at the 53 oil companies. This method is preferred because it allows an in-depth study of the subject. To gather data, structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 159 procurement officers, who were selected using simple random sampling, from the three strata. Once collected, data was analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Quantitative data was analysed using multiple regression analysis. The qualitative data generated was analysed by use of Statistical Package of Social Sciences (SPSS) version 22.Results: The response rate of the study was 75%. The findings of the study indicated that reverse logistics management, information technology adoption, early vendor involvement and green procurement adoption have a positive relationship with performance in companies in the oil industry.Contributions to policy and practice: The study recommended that companies in the oil industry should embrace supply chain sustainability so as to improve performance and further researches should to be carried out in other institutions to find out if the same results can be obtained.

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Prioritizing the Solutions to Reverse Logistics Barriers for the E-Commerce Industry in Pakistan Based on a Fuzzy AHP-TOPSIS Approach

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su132212743 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (22) ◽

pp. 12743

Author(s):

Muhammad Hamza Naseem ◽

Jiaqi Yang ◽

Ziquan Xiang

Keyword(s):

Supply Chain ◽

Literature Review ◽

Reverse Logistics ◽

Fuzzy Ahp ◽

Pairwise Comparison ◽

Fuzzy Topsis ◽

Extensive Literature ◽

Forward Logistics ◽

Reverse Logistics Management ◽

Topsis Approach

In the past few years, reverse logistics practices have successfully managed to gain more attention in various industries and among supply chain researchers and experts. This is due to globalization, environmental concerns, and customer requirements, which have asserted industries’ concerns for reverse logistics management. In E-commerce, the process of reverse logistics originates with parcel refusal, undelivered goods, and exchanges. In developing countries like Pakistan, the adoption and implications of reverse logistics are still at their early stages. E-commerce companies give more attention to forward logistics and ignore logistics’ upstream flow in the supply chain. This study aims to identify, as well as list, the barriers and obtain the solutions to those identified barriers, and rank the barriers and their solutions so that logisticians and experts can solve them as per their priority. From the extensive literature review and experts’ opinions, we have found 14 barriers in implementing effective reverse logistics. Eight solutions to those barriers were also found from the literature review. This paper proposed the methodology based on fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (fuzzy-AHP), which used to get the weights of each barrier by using pairwise comparison, and fuzzy technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (fuzzy-TOPSIS) method, which was adopted for the final ranking of solutions to reverse logistics. The case of the Pakistan E-commerce industry is used in the proposed method.

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