April 09, 2014
News

By Chris Caplice & Francisco Jauffred

Can both levers be coordinated to create the right level of resilience despite unforeseen changes in the environment, such as lead time delays, demand fluctuations or network failures?

Traditional transportation planning (determining how many units of which asset type to use in what locations within your network) is usually conducted using a deterministic optimization-based tool. The costs of each potential option are calculated and the lowest-cost solution that meets the required expected service levels is selected.

This approach is widely used for transportation network design, procurement and scheduling problems because it works well. The tool provides a great mechanism for consolidating massive amounts of data and arriving at the best decision based on a seemingly unlimited number of potential options. In other words, it truly finds the “optimal” solution.

Read the full article here. (PDF)

Supply Chain Brain