A study on green supply chain practices and performance of third party logistics 3pl industry in india

Abstract

Any manufacturing company has to adopt GSCM practices and Environment Management System (ISO 14001) with increased pressures from regulation, customer choice / awareness and international competitive market. The recent trend of cost reduction with reduced inventory levels paved a way for outsourcing and has given prominence to the concept of Third Party Logistics (3PL). Utilizing a 3PL provider has become an increasing tendency for most of the modern multinational companies. In India, a positive growth trend is observed in city and luxury bus markets. The demand for commercial bus building is also high throughout the year. The service of 3PL providers for bus body building segment has become very complex due to non-standard code of operations. This research deals with the GSCP being implemented by 3PL industries in India. Statistical study of various practices implemented by the 3PL industries, their level of implementation and the consequent influence on company performance have been carried out. Quantitative research method is adopted due to the exploratory nature of this study. 3PL companies who extended their willingness to participate in this study, are surveyed. Various information on general background, level of adoption of GSCP and the performance of company in terms of environmental, operational and economic aspects have been collected. Statistical software SPSS has been used for performing reliability analysis, descriptive analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis. The outcome of these analysis shows that there exists a significant positive relationship between GSCP and company performance An application of GSCP in a 3PL industry has been demonstrated with regard to implementation of a proposed 3PL model with a single centralized warehouse to serve a bus body building company. Investment costs as well as running costs related to storage system, load units, material handling equipment, computer system, modification of existing warehouse building, inbound and outbound transportation etc for the proposed model have been computed. On comparison of existing system with the proposed model, there is an appreciable saving on implementation of proposed 3PL model. This GSCP implemented 3PL model contributes to the development of a supply chain sector, which may further be used as a model to be implemented in similar manufacturing sectors. In this thesis, a new part code generation system, which exactly reflects the geometrical and physical features of the parts avoiding duplication has been developed. An automatic part code generating tool that can be commonly used in any bus body building industry has also been developed with user friendly GUI. This also provides the benefit of grouping similar parts in the warehouse, belonging to obsolete / excess / non-moving categories, together in order to dispose it by suitable method either sales or recycle. newline