Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
COVID-19 was a major pandemic that struck the world at the beginning of the year 2020. Many companies suffered sudden disruptions in their manufacturing operations, logistics and even in their capacity to reach their customers. This capstone project addressed the need of a global pharmaceutical company to understand what digital...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
Many trucks in the US travel well below permitted cube and volume utilization, so consolidating two or more shipments onto a single multi-stop truckload (MSTL) route can increase truck utilization and decrease transportation costs. Many shippers and carriers lack sufficient network volume, transportation analytics capabilities, and supply network influence to...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
Inventory management is an essential operation in the supply chain, owing to its strategic importance in supporting item availability and business continuity. The demand for slow-moving items is fundamentally ambiguous compared to demand for traditional fast-moving items due to the irregular demand pattern of slow-moving items, which causes forecasting problems...
Thesis/Capstone
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Many firms rely on key performance indicators (KPIs) to manage their business. Though countless metrics exist, it can be difficult for companies to identify which metrics are driving their performance. This is problematic within industry, as insignificant KPIs can lead to misguided management insights. This research analyzes how companies and...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
In 2019 most of sponsor company’s transactions came from its freight forwarding service. Due to strategic alliances between retail giants and freight carriers, the profit margins of independent freight forwarders are being squeezed. To survive the company needs to ensure that its warehousing and distribution services are sufficiently profitable. However...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
The food-service industry in the United States is worth approximately $300 Billion annually and supports 1 million jobs across the country. The sponsoring company is a major distributor in the United States for different categories of restaurant chains, ranging from counter-only-service to full-service. The key products in their supply chain...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
The world’s largest coffee chain is looking to cater to different patterns of customer demand especially in metro areas that are densely packed with their stores. With more of the demand becoming mobile and customers gravitating towards curbside pick-up of orders, the leading coffee retailer is looking to redesign their...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
The COVID-19 pandemic created a global shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and cleaning supplies. This environment motivated the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to reconsider its decentralized procurement model and develop a temporary, centralized, and more sustainable model for the sourcing and distribution of these items to enable safe...
Thesis/Capstone
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With the fast growth of e-commerce, online shoppers are becoming accustomed to free and fast delivery. Small and medium-sized businesses are experiencing rising transportation costs as they are having to switch from slower methods of shipping to fast delivery options (e.g., next day or two-day) to cater to customer demand...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
Optimizing the flow of goods across the globe is incentivized by logistics savings, amplified by an enterprise’s economies of scale. Waters’ international shipments are majorly carried out via air freight and are exclusively performed by three main carriers: Expeditors, FedEx, and UPS. The specific problem addressed in this capstone is...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
Companies in the Consumer-Packaged Goods Industry are faced with a chronic dilemma: efficiency vs. agility. Companies must find the balance between scale, which creates cost-saving opportunities, and flexibility, which often incurs incremental costs. The main questions addressed in this capstone pertain to manufacturing and logistics decisions. Simply put, how much...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
The sponsor company for this capstone has a complex logistics network due to the fact they use a service model for their products. Their products use advanced technology to service water, wastewater, oil, and gas pipelines across the world. This requires managing the movement of these products from their inventory...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
Biopharmaceutical companies are increasingly exploring cutting-edge novel gene therapies (GTs) in an effort to cure rare diseases. This capstone develops and tests a practical forecasting framework for sharing capacity across Roche’s evolving GT portfolio and driving strategic global supply chain network design. Our problem is challenging, even by the highly...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
Nepal’s immunization coverage hovers around 78%, and 59 out of 77 districts have not yet been fully immunized. The objective of this study is to review the vaccine last-mile distribution to find a cost-efficient solution using a combination of modes of transportation to improve vaccine availability. This study determines which...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
Supply chain horizontal collaboration has captured the attention of many researchers and practitioners. Horizontal collaboration offers multiple benefits in creating competitive advantages for companies and leveraging their sustainability in the long term. Although collaboration creates value for the supply chain, there is no evidence of what makes companies adopt these...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
Over the past several years, there has been severe market volatility in the truckload industry leading to cost increases and efficiency losses for shippers and carriers. Previous research has investigated the many factors that contribute to such market conditions. One topic that has yet to be analyzed is “ghost freight.”...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
The nature of the apparel industry is enigmatic. Customers want differentiated products and agility, yet apparel is mainly produced in low-income countries with long lead times to compete on cost. This mismatch leads to poor planning, simultaneous over- and understocking, resulting in markdowns and lost sales. Supply chain segmentation has...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
The Consumer Product Goods (CPG) industry such as the bottled water business is subject to bottlenecks, due in part to both product characteristics, stochastic nature of the demand of products, and customer lead time volatility. Nevertheless, CPG companies are expected to be able to serve customers that rely on their...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
In developing countries, small mom-and-pop grocery stores called nanostores are one of the main grocery market channels. Cash constraints are a severe issue that affects these small businesses, preventing them from buying enough inventory to meet client demand, and forcing them to reject orders from suppliers due to a lack...
Thesis/Capstone
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Throughput is a critical performance metric for warehouse operations in the food industry. Accurate throughput estimations are necessary for effectively planning replenishments, inventory levels, and labor resources to meet the needs of customers. General Mills, who manages a large variety portfolio with different packaging, demand volatility, storage requirements, and outbound...
Thesis/Capstone
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Companies are often faced with the need to make supply chain investment decisions to support new product introductions while there is still significant uncertainty in the demand expectations. This situation forces tradeoffs in supply chain capacity investments versus the risk of lost sales. To address this tradeoff, we have proposed...
Thesis/Capstone
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The Great Lakes region is a convenient transportation route for the suppliers and the customers in North America. Various types of goods are being transported in the region including dry bulk commodities such as iron ore, coal, grain, and salt. The sponsor company for this project is a provider of...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
Information sharing is one of the established approaches to improve demand forecasting and reduce the bullwhip effect, but it is infeasible to do so effectively in a long supply chain. Using the polystyrene industry as a case study, this thesis explores the usage of modern natural language processing (NLP) techniques...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
With the rising adoption of e-commerce and online shopping, many retailers are facing the challenge of transitioning across channels to offer a seamless customer experience. One way of addressing this challenge consists of leveraging omnichannel retailing. Our sponsor company, a large US grocery retailer, is striving toward providing an omnichannel...
Thesis/Capstone
Publication Date
Driver dwell time is an important challenge the U.S trucking industry faces. High, unplanned dwell times are costly to all stakeholders in the industry as they result in detention costs, declining performance and decreased driver capacity. With the increasing demand for these services, it is important to maximize the driving...