The Evaluation of Status Quo of Growth Capacity in Chinese Logistics Enterprises

2.1 The choice of evaluation method

Because enterprise growth force has a decisive role to enterprise growth and selection of enterprise growth path, some scholars have launched research to the evaluation of enterprise growth force, such as Zhao Ran and Jiang Yuntong[6] studied constraints of enterprises growth in each stage of life and constructed a evaluation index system and evaluation model of business growth force; Wang Qin and He Jun[7], Liu Lin[8] respectively build the evaluation index system of enterprise growth. But the evaluation index system is too general, consideration is not comprehensive, ignore the study of the formation process of enterprise growth and the difference uniqueness of influencing factors in different industriesdifferent levels and different environment, its operational and practical evaluation effect is general, especially for logistics enterprise in our country which are in growth stage, it is lack of practical guiding significance.

AHP is proposed by an American Operations Research Professor of University of Pittsburgh named Saaty[9-10] in the early 1970s, when he studied the project of “according to the size of each industrial sector’s contribution to the national welfare and distribute the electric power”, he used the theory of network system and muti-objective comprehensive evaluation method and then proposed the hierarchical weighted decision analysis method.

As a practical muti-criteria decision making method, a complex issue can be represented as an orderly structure by AHP[11], through the judgment of decision by people, then sort in order[12]. Compared with other methods, the biggest advantage of AHP is that it can combine quantitative methods and qualitative methods, it can deal with many actual question which can not be managed by traditional optimization technology[13]. That is also the reason why this paper use AHP to evaluate the logistics enterprises growth.

The basic steps of AHP:

1. establish a hierarchy model of the system;

2. construct judgment matrix;

3. consistency check;

4. Calculate and sort the weight vector.

2.2 The construction of evaluation index system

Using the AHP to comprehensively evaluate the logistics enterprises growth, firstly we must determine the index system which reflects the strength of logistics enterprise growth, and establish a hierarchy of evaluating logistics enterprises’ growth force according to the requirement of the overall goal and nature[14]. Based on the factors which affect the growth of the logistics enterprises, we evaluate enterprise growth from three aspects: the growth environment, growth ability, growth potential.

(1) Growth environment: It is an important guarantee for the expansion of production and logistics enterprises, which highlights the external link of enterprise growth, it is the major premise condition of logistics enterprise survival. Growing environment mainly includes the national policy, the state environmental protection policy, logistics industry growth.

(2) Growth ability: It is the key to the growth of the logistics enterprise in a certain period of time and is the core part of the development of the company, it can not be ignored and abandoned, this part can highlight the current competitiveness of logistics enterprises to grow. Growth ability subdivision factors include market share growth, net profit growth, logistics service growth, enterprise scale growth.

(3) Growth potential: It is the source of the sustained growth of logistics enterprises, which is part of the outstanding future attributes of enterprise growth, it determine the future growth rate of enterprises and it is also a measurement scale. The main factor of the growth potential segments includes business equipment and technology, information technology, asset security, marketing capabilities, the enterprise personnel quality.

According to the analysis of various levels index, we can establish a comprehensive evaluation index system of logistics enterprise growing hierarchy, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

The evaluation index system of logistics enterprise growing

3.1 Construct judgment matrix

After the establishment of a hierarchical model, affiliation between the upper and lower levels of factors was determined. On this basis, need to determine the relative importance of each factor in each level. In the analytic hierarchy process, in order to make quantitative judgment, the judgment by the introduction of appropriate scale numerical representation and write judgment matrix, the judgment matrix representation for a level to some factors, the hierarchy and the related factors of relative importance are compared[15]. Judgment matrix is usually refer to the following 1∼9 scaling method, as shown in Table 1.

3.2 Single-level sorting and consistency test

The maximum eigenvalue λ_max of judgment matrix corresponding to feature vector, after normalizing the corresponding factors is the same level to a level of the relative importance of factors of a sort of weight, a process known as single hierarchy sort. It is very important to keep the consistency of critical thinking when use AHP, lest appear such contradiction as more important than B₂, B₁, B₂ is more important than B₃, and B₃ is more important than B₁[16]. Therefore, judgment matrix provided by the experts, it is necessary to make a consistency check, to decide whether to accept it.

Hierarchical order sorting and consistency check steps are as follows:

(1) Calculate the product M_i of each row of judgment matrix and calculate the n-th root.

Normalized relative importance vector wi′

(2) Normalize vector W, then get the desires of the corresponding weight.

(3) Calculate the maximum characteristic root of the judgment matrix λ_max.

(4) Calculate the consistency index CI

(5) Calculate the proportion of consistency CR

Among them, we need to find the corresponding average random consistency index RI, as shown in Table 2.

When CR < 0.10, think that the consistency of judgment matrix is acceptable, otherwise the judgment matrix should be amended. The structure of judgment matrix and the important degree of each factor calculation and consistency inspection results are shown in Table 3∼6.

3.3 The total sorting of level and consistency test

Using the results of the single sort of the same level in all levels, you can calculate importance weights of all the elements of this level aimed at the up level, which is referred to as a hierarchy total ordering. Hierarchy total ordering need to be done step by step from top to bottom in order. For the highest level, the level of single order is the total order.

Set up the level total sorts weight of the three elements B₁, B₂, B₃ of the level (B layer) as b₁, b₂, b₃. Each element hierarchy total weight of C layer C₁, C₂, ⋯, C₁₂ is calculated as:

Here, when there is no connection between C_j and B_j, Cji=0. Normalizes the results, then get the hierarchy total ordering of elements in the C layer, which is named total importance degree, the calculation process are shown in Table 7.

Through the calculation and analysis of the table, the main factors that affect the branch of group logistics growth force is its growth ability, growth ability is the key to the growth of the branch of logistics company within this stage, and it is the core part of the development of the company.

3.4 The evaluation of growth status of one group logistics company

The lack of AHP is that people’s subjective factors on the impact of the entire process is great from the establishment of a hierarchical model to give pairwise comparison matrix. In addition, when the problem is very complicated, the judgment matrix does not satisfy the consistency, it is difficult to make accurate choices[13]. In order to make the evaluation of the current situation of logistics branch company growth more realistic, we can use the growth power index to represent the comprehensive growth of logistics branch, the computation formula of growth index is as follows:

The G in the formula represents the growth power index of the logistics branch, C_i represents the total weight of the indicators in C layer, X_i represents the assessment scores of influence degree to the growth power of logistics enterprise.

The assessment scores of influence degree to the growth power of logistics enterprise are shown in Table 8.

We can know that from the Table 7 and Table 8:

We use Li Baizhou enterprise growth evaluation standard to judge the strength of the logistics branch growth force, enterprise growth evaluation criteria are shown in Table 9:

The G = 174.4 shows that the logistics branch growth is at the medium level.