Does service quality influence operational and financial performance of third party logistics service providers? A mixed multi criteria decision making -text mining-based investigation

• Published in: Transportation research. Part E, Logistics and transportation review Logistics and transportation review, 2022-01, Vol.157, p.102558, Article 102558
• Main Authors: Pal Singh, Satender, Adhikari, Arnab, Majumdar, Adrija, Bisi, Arnab
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: COPRA; MOORA; Performance evaluation; Service quality; Text mining; Third-party logistics
• ISSN: 1366-5545; 1878-5794
• DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2021.102558

•Study association between the service quality and performance of 3PL firms.•Apply a CRITIC-based weighting for scientific weight assignment to the parameters.•Design a MOORA-COPRA method for operational and financial performance assessment.•Apply sentiment analysis to get customers’ emotions on service quality of 3PL firms.•Explore the relationship between customers’ sentiment and 3PL firms’ performance. Since its inception, the third party logistics (3PL) industry has remained an area of interest for academicians and practitioners. The existing literature mostly focuses on single multi criteria decision making (MCDM) method-based holistic performance evaluations of 3PL service providers, whereas distinct operational and financial performance measurements have not received enough attention. Several real-life examples of organizations, such as Hub Group and DSV, indicate that the reliance on financial performance improvement solely does not ensure better operational performance and integrated performance, and vice versa. Additionally, there is an absence of works that focus on designing an integrated MCDM methodology that applies multiple MCDM methods to increase the robustness of the methodology and consider distinct operational, financial, and integrated performance measurements of the 3PL service providers. Additionally, the application of emerging ratio analysis-based MCDM methods such as multi objective optimization based on ratio analysis (MOORA) and complex proportional assessment (COPRA) for performance evaluation has been ignored. Furthermore, the assessment of the service quality of 3PL service providers through their customers’ feedback and the association of this service quality with the abovementioned performance measures have not received enough attention. This motivates us to design a criteria importance through intercriteria correlation (CRITIC) weighting-based integrated MOORA-COPRA MCDM methodology for the performance evaluation of 3PL service providers. We apply our proposed methodology to evaluate the performance of 21 leading 3PL service providers in North America. Additionally, we incorporate text mining methods such as sentiment analysis and topic modeling to analyze the effect of these service providers’ service quality captured through their customers’ reviews on distinct operational, financial, and integrated performance. The insights obtained from the study indicate that service quality (as captured from the consumer reviews) has