Space is one of the most scarce, expensive, and difficult to manage resources in urban retail establishments. A typical retail space broadly consists of two areas, the customer facing frontroom area and the backroom area, which is used for inventory storage and other support activities. While frontrooms have received considerable...
The growing trend of e-commerce has led to new ways of selling and delivering products, resulting in increasing scale and complexity of last mile home delivery. The drive to provide convenience to consumers has led companies to offer faster delivery times. As a result, companies have focused on facility location...
This project qualitatively estimates the potential impact of 3D printing on the United States metalworking industry. The adoption rate of 3D printing has been increasing in the last few years. On one side are businesses with long development and production lead times, competing in fast-paced industries. Moreover, some businesses are...
The U.S. energy portfolio is set to undergo drastic change in the coming decades. Policies to reduce emissions combined with growing demand for energy will test existing infrastructure. Large reserves of shale gas provide an attractive near-term solution to help states transition from coal-powered plants to cleaner fuel. Most commercial...
When it comes to LTL shipping, it can be tough for shippers to get the performance that they expect due to the makeup of LTL networks. On-time performance is dependent on many more factors than in full truckload shipping. Performance often comes down to attributes of the shipment such as...
On-shelf availability (OSA) is key in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry. In this project, out of stock (OOS) patterns are identified, grouped, and analyzed in order to gain meaningful insights to improve OSA. The approach is to normalize a time-series dataset, search for similar OOS patterns, and analyze some...
Apeel Sciences has made it their mission to help eliminate food waste. To do so, they are introducing their exciting new product, EdipeelTM, to market. Edipeel is an edible, natural, flavorless coating that, when applied to the surfaces of fresh fruit, reduces the rate at which produce spoilage occurs. The...
The significance of seaports in enabling global trade and impacting global supply chains require them to operate efficiently. Due to the required interactions, seaports are not only affected by their operations, but by other parties in the transport chain. The existing interactions between multiple parties in the transport chain add...
Construction procurement often involves negotiations between many parties over multitudes of components. The process of allocating contracts to suppliers is generally a complex process involving multiple decision makers processing large amounts of information. Minimizing project costs while meeting stringent specification and schedule requirements is especially difficult. In most cases, procurement...
In response to increasing urbanization, China seeks alternative public transportation methods, such as bike- sharing, which has demonstrated social and environmental benefits. As a result, the number of bike-sharing programs has grown rapidly over the last five years in China. Our sponsoring company TalkingData collects bike-sharing usage data via smartphones...
A CPG company is examining its end-to-end supply chain to find opportunities to optimize both cost and visibility. One minimally tapped source of these opportunities is the inbound supply network. This report studies three design changes to the CPG company’s current inbound supply network, namely: 1) Consolidated Inbound and Outbound...
Retail companies struggle to maintain the appropriate levels of inventory on promotional and seasonal items due to management pressure to never be out of stock. Dynamically changing desired service levels during promotions or seasonal periods will ensure accurate safety stock levels and reduce manual interventions. We simulate inventory policies introducing...
Business forecasting frequently combines quantitative time series techniques with qualitative expert opinion overrides to create a final consensus forecast. The objective of these overrides is to reduce forecast error, which enables safety stock reduction, customer service improvement, and manufacturing schedule stability. However, these overrides often fail to improve final forecast...
The number of natural hazards has been increasing over the last 10 years. Understanding the impact of natural hazards on retail networks is crucial to make effective planning against disruptions. We used daily sales and inventory data from a country-wide retail network and natural emergencies historic data to quantify the...
Effective businesses implement a monthly Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) process within their organizations to align and coordinate different functions of the business under a single plan. Despite this significant undertaking, once businesses align on a S&OP plan, little effort is made on methodically assessing risks in the plan to...
Many supply chains must change in order to capture new opportunities and adapt to new demands and new markets. This is study explains how we can improve the delivery policy in the cement industry to lead the change needed. We have studied the case where a cement company, Votorantim Cimentos...
The fashion industry has been facing many challenges when it comes to forecasting demand for new products. The macroeconomic shifts in the industry have contributed to short product lifecycles and the obsolescence of the retail calendar, and consequently an increase in demand variability. This project tackles this problem from a...
This capstone assesses the feasibility and potential value of implementing Demand Sensing in the supp ly chain of a major consumer medical device company - Johnson & Johnson Vision Care. Specifically, we explore the potential benefits of incorporating downstream Supply Chain data into forecasting, reducing l atency between Sales and...
A set of contracts guides every movement of cargo from one point to another. In this thesis, we focus on the contract between the charterer and the ship-owner in the liquid bulk ocean-shipping market. The contracting process begins with the two parties finding each other suitable and ends with one...
Over the years, supply chain management has continued to change and evolve to become a major component in competitive strategy to enhance organizational productivity and profitability. While considerable research has been done in formulating accurate and robust demand forecasts, many areas for improvement remain in supply chain planning. In particular...
Container shipping is one of the most important aspects of the global supply chain. Currently, approximately 60% of all seaborne trade is moved through containers. However, despite the growth in trade, there has been little investment in process improvements which has led to the growth of supply chain issues in...
Micro and small firms represent the largest percentage of the businesses operating in Latin America having a high employability contribution and a high potential Gross Domestic Product (GDP) impact on the region. However, depending on the context of the country, region and sector nearly one out of four companies fail...
The sponsor company, a multinational CPG, is under pressure to reduce inventory levels of finished goods and raw and pack materials, while achieving its target sales service level. Currently, it uses a single-echelon inventory management approach. This prevents the company from achieving cross stage inventory improvements. For that reason, in...
A multinational chemical company is looking to include duties and duty credits as consideration factors in its production planning. This undertaking requires understanding of not only domestic trading laws but also international trading laws and how trading blocs can affect them. The company’s products are manufactured and shipped across different...
Healthcare cost are on the rise and becoming a major concern in the US economy. In fact, healthcare spending is the largest individual contributor to US gross domestic product. Various stakeholders such as government, insurance and payors are now looking at the healthcare providers and manufacturers to come up with...
