Purpose – The purpose of our thesis is to introduce a new approach to help small and medium third party logistics service providers (3PLs) to develop and improve their Reverse logistics.

Design/methodology/approach – A case study was adopted, and a qualitative questionnaire and face-to-face interview were used to collect the fundamental data. In addition, the multi-criteria decision-making tool-AHP and the Reverse Logistics audit model were used to analyze the case and to solve the problem of 3PLs in Reverse Logistics improvement.

Findings – Under the fierce competition and in today’s volatile market, the Reverse Logistics is considered as a new competitive advantage to many 3PLs. However, the effective solutions in instructing 3PLs how to develop and improve their Reverse Logistics competence are still very scarce. Based on these, a new approach will be presented in this thesis to help 3PLs to solve problem.

Limitations – There are two main limitations in our paper, which emerge in the two models we adopted. Regarding the Reverse Logistics audit model, we need more data of the case company to support our research. For the AHP method, the limitation is:  the fact that general assumptions were used to provide correlative data in computation, and complex computation was simplified in order to show calculative processes clearly.

Practical implications – FLB, the case company will be researched to verify the practical implication of our new approach. We believe through our approach, lots of small and medium size 3PLs will find it easier to get a holistic view of their RL competence, and know how to develop or improve it.

Originality/value – How to evaluate and assess the RL competence will be presented separately from inside view of 3PLs and outside view of their customers. AHP and self-made RL audit model will be used to achieve then respectively.

Keywords Reverse logistics, Analytic hierarchy process, Assessment tool, and 3PLs 

Paper type Case study/ Research paper