A New Approach for Evaluating the Order Fulfillment Process Options of B2C Horizontal Portals Using DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis)

摘要

By using the traditional statistical or operations research methods for deciding the product-delivery logistics, the portal companies are not using their competitive advantages on being more e-enabled, informed and computationally able than their traditional counterparts. In this paper, we show some typical characteristics of the portals like their handling of a huge range of goods in terms of transactional values or volumes. Subsequently, we have identified three types of generic product-delivery logistics of the portals with various intermediate entities or trading partners. Then, a completely different approach using an extreme point method rather than the traditional central-tendency-based statistical methods has been suggested.