Bütünleşik çok ölçütlü karar verme yaklaşımı kullanılarak hava kargo acentelerinin değerlendirilmesi

Every step of the transportation process becomes more and more important for the players of the air cargo industry, which is growing both in importance and size. According to the report published by IATA (IATA, 2021), the air cargo sector has grown by 9.9% in cargo-ton kilometers (CTKs) basis in June 2021 compared to June 2019. Businesses are trying to take their strategic decisions more accurately and in a timely manner, due to both the global conflicts and crises in world trade and the aim of competing players to maintain their existence with higher contribution and performance. The fact that air cargo is in a growth trend despite the pandemic conditions has made the capacities offered by carrier companies more valuable than in the past. Freight forwarder selection and evaluation is of great importance for airline carriers who want to use their limited capacities with the highest profit and efficiency. This study is based on an evaluation and ranking among 5 freight forwarders selected in terms of the largest air cargo carrier in Turkey. The aim of the study is to contribute to the subsidy-incentive system used by the company for freight forwarders based in Turkey from a different perspective. In the study, there are 12 criteria determined for freight forwarder evaluation in line with the opinions of experts who play different roles in the business. These are total revenue, technology level, on-time delivery, payment reputation, global coverage, responsiveness, stability of supply, quantity of supply, e-AWB utilization rate, error-free documentation, quality of operation and annual growth rate. With 3 decision makers experienced in the air cargo industry, the criteria were weighted according to the DEMATEL (The Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) method. On a scale between 0 and 4, decision makers make choices about the extent to which the criteria affect each other. Thanks to this method, the weights of freight forwarder evaluation criteria are determined. Since linguistic expressions are used for the evaluation of freight forwarders, in the second stage of the method, alternatives are listed with the Fuzzy TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity) method. Thanks to this method, which is based on the determination of the alternatives closest to the positive ideal solution or the farthest from the negative ideal solution, freight forwarders are ranked from the perspective of an air cargo company. The criteria weights obtained as a result of the DEMATEL methodology are used in the Fuzzy TOPSIS process. As a result, the air cargo company can apply a subsidy-incentive method with a more detailed but also a holistic evaluation, with the ranking that emerges as a result of the two-stage multi-criteria decision-making method. In the case of a subsidy-incentive evaluation in line with this method, freight forwarders are expected to fulfill the requirements in commercial, operational and sustainability fields rather than an attitude towards meeting only one or two criteria. This will contribute to the more efficient use of each unit of capacity by carrier companies in the long run.