Usage of two-stage Integrating Data Envelopment Analysis to Propose the Best Strategic Alliance: A Case of the Green Logistics Providers

In the wave of internationalization, many companies use strategic alliance like an approach to expand and strengthen their businesses. Strategic alliance is also considered to be a highly intelligent approach in green logistics for environment and e-commerce growing quickly and effectively because this is the critical concern worldwide to balance the economic development with the environmental protection. However, a suitable methodology to evaluate and analyze performance of partners is a critical and significant issue for top managers to have effective decisions making for business strategy including alliance strategy in the future. This will improve business performance and reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions among the hot trend of development of green logistics providers. Over past to future forecasting, this paper tries to propose a new approach of data envelopment analysis (DEA) based on grey forecasting and neural network, helping the target company – CSX Corporation make a well-considered decision to select the best strategic alliance candidates. The results indicate that Hub Group Inc. and Con-way Freight are the very best candidates for CSX to have strategic alliances. This combination is suggested not only good for the target company but also beneficial for the partners as well. This is a new studying method in both academic research studies and practical applications by combining Grey theory, neural network and DEA model which probably gives a better “past-present-future” insights into evaluation performance of an industry.