Conclusions & future research scope
The evaluation and selection of the 3PL for mobile industry segment is a top management level strategic decision. The
quantity of e-waste is tremendously increasing and it has become menace to society and environmental burden. The
legislations like Restriction on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive and Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment
Directive (WEEE) gaining importance in current business environment. The electronics appliances manufacturing companies
are more interested to focus upon their core competencies and services of 3PL is a right choice for them to separate reverse
logistics operations. Therefore, hiring the services of 3PL is an importance issue and present work is very significant in this
regards. Now-a-days, efficient reverse logistics operation is regarded as a focused problem. Development of a sound reverse
logistics system is beneficial to environmental protection, and the companies may improve their financial health also by
handing the return in a professional way. Mostly the manufacturing industries does not have enough competence to manage
their product reverse flow in supply chain, thus they have to only option to outsource their reverse logistics operations to the
3PL service provider for conduct of reverse logistics (RL) activities. To make AHP-TOPSIS model more effective, top
management must establish key criteria for evaluation and selection of third party logistics service providers. The attributes
may be increase or decrease as per the needs of the industry. In real life business environment it is very difficult to find
suitable criteria for the evaluation and selection of outsourcing partner. In the present work, a decision model has been
developed for the mobile phones manufacturing company only. However, the same decision model may be applicable for
different market segment with minor modification.The hybrid AHP-TOPSIS method presented in this research properly
guides policy makers for evaluation of 3PL reverse logistics service providers and support them visualize the intensity of
impact of various criteria on the alternatives available before reaching at the final decision.
There is always a scope for further improvement in the research, so a comparative study may be conducted by using other
multi-criteria decision-making methods to validate the results obtained by present method. An analytic network process
(ANP) approach may be used for consideration the interactions between attributes and the results could be compared by using
interpretive structural modeling (ISM) based approach. Matlab version 11 has been used for calculation purpose in this work.
Customized software may be developed to reduce computational speed and simplification of calculations.