Technological breakthroughs and consumer preferences have led to e-commerce growth in the United States. Given the continued rise in e-commerce demand, the final leg of transportation of goods to the end recipient, or the “last-mile,” is of increasing importance to freight services companies. The last- mile is one of the...
With the evolution of technology, more data became available to observe consumer purchase patterns. Traditional forecast methods used to rely on only shipment history. Nonetheless, due to the accessibility of consumer data, a forecast process that integrates downstream flow has shown good results in improving the forecast accuracy in supply...
Traditionally, female business owners have been believed to have relative disadvantages in operating businesses compared to their male counterparts especially in developing countries. This study examines whether gender difference affects the cash management efficiency of micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in Latin America. Cash conversion cycle (CCC), the metric which...
Digital technology advancement has been greatly changing grocery retailing customers’ behavior and expectations. Enabled by digital technologies and pleased by the digital disruptors, customers nowadays are expecting convenient online shopping and fast delivery. To retain their loyalty, retailers are forced to provide better services through digital transformation. World’s leading retailer...
With the increased application of cognitive computing across the spectrum of industries, companies strive to ready their people and machines for future system change. Based on resource constraints, business needs, and the speed of change, many companies may opt for system augmentation rather than the adoption of entirely new systems...
The transportation sector is one of the two principal contributors to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and its contributions are expected to double by 2050. Growing consumer demand for home deliveries with high service levels at low costs is quickly becoming the standard. As a result, retailers are transforming their supply...
Aerospace and defense companies often struggle with effective inventory management of consumable material inventories. Unlike piece parts, which have a known and defined required quantity, consumable material requirements may vary from one build to the next, even on different builds of the same parent assembly or part number. This variation...
Most organizations spend significant time on improving the processes and systems related to outbound movement of goods, i.e., cargo moving from the production site to customers. This focus often ignores the other aspect of the supply chain, namely inbound cargo movement, which refers to the shipments coming from the suppliers...
E-commerce sales have grown exponentially since the introduction of the smart phone in 2007 and the trend is expected to continue. As retailers enter e-commerce, the pressure to provide more and faster delivery options to the customer is increasing. The resulting complexity and increased delivery speeds are often expensive. Providing...
As transportation costs rise, companies need to become more efficient to remain profitable. One way to increase efficiency in transportation is to increase fleet utilization through the addition of backhaul routes. Most truck routes consist of delivering from a distribution center to stores and then returning to the distribution center...
The rapid growth in e-commerce volumes, coupled with customer expectations of faster, flexible and cheaper parcel deliveries is increasing the pressure on retailers to design the most efficient delivery network. Collection-and-delivery points (CDPs) allow for the aggregation of demand and enable reductions in travel time and costs. CDPs also help...
Inventory planning is one of the most important processes in supply chain management that plays an important role in the success of an Engineer-to-Order (ETO) business. Supply chain and inventory managers in ETO businesses always face challenges in determining an appropriate inventory level because of the uncertainty nature of the...
The Demand Driven Material Requirement Planning (DDMRP) was introduced in 2011 to improve the performance of supply chain planning. The Demand Driven Institute (DDI) reports that DDMRP reduces the inventory levels by 31% (median) while improving the service level by 13% (median) and reducing the customer order lead time. Such...
The United States beer industry operates, by law, under a three-tier distribution network. MillerCoors [SAC1] has made the strategic decision to open distribution centers across the United States to handle complexity while maintaining service levels. Opening new distribution centers, and introducing a new tier to the supply chain, requires MillerCoors...
As more of the world’s population moves to cities, urban logistics becomes increasingly important to a company’s distribution operations. Urban distribution network studies must address the same strategic questions as traditional large-scale distribution networks including sizing and locating distribution facilities and determining which facilities should serve which customers. These studies...
With an aim to avoid stock-outs, retail pharmacy business constantly deals with the problem of inventory build-up across the supply chain. There are myriad reasons for the rise in inventory such as promotions and forecasting errors. While there is a need to improve the forecasting accuracies with better data coming...
In previous decades the postal sector experienced drastic changes. Liberalization and digitization resulted in a continuous mail market decline. Simultaneously the rise of Internet resulted in a booming e-commerce parcel delivery market. To cope with these ongoing market developments Postal Operators (POs) need to rigorously restructure their delivery networks frequently...
While festivals bring a reason to cheer for everyone, businesses dealing with a spike in demand for perishables may have to live with the misery of lost sales and/or expired items. In the case of the dairy industry that deals with liquid milk, both raw material, and finished goods are...
As urbanization and e-commerce continue to grow at a rapid rate, companies are rethinking the way they operate their final-mile distribution networks to prepare for the scaling of their costs. How can companies leverage their existing e-commerce distribution networks to fulfill demand across multiple service offerings, and should they jointly...
E-commerce and store fulfilment operations have traditionally been held separate as multichannel supply chains because of their different operational requirements. Omnichannel distribution makes inventory available to several distribution channels that were traditionally kept separate. Separate channels have overlaps, higher transportation costs and do not allow the same customer experience as...
Due to the use of petroleum-based fuel, the transportation sector is one of the two principal contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and its contributions are expected to double by 2050. Freight sector contributes to around 30% of all transport related CO 2 emissions. Since different type of vehicles exhibit different...
With the globalization of trade, transit time reliability has become a critical point in the shipping industry as irregularities will lead to more delays further down the supply chain. Our sponsoring company, A.P. Møller – Mærsk A/S (Maersk) provides freight forwarding services to its clients, offering them a complete set...
The sponsoring company, wants to review their raw material ordering policy and production plan for one of their product segments. This product faces a high degree of volatility in demand and the company currently orders one month of demand worth of products from the suppliers. The suppliers offer incremental discounts...
Pharmaceuticals account for over hundreds of billions of dollars of the global annual healthcare expenditure. Inventory management is essential for the financial health of the retail pharmaceutical industry. The retail pharmacy studied in this research, faced a challenge managing high-performance inventory policies. This capstone project aims to determine how a...
The apparel industry is facing significant challenges. Today’s consumers have less patience to wait, and omnichannel retailing is the new norm. This requires the entire apparel supply chain to become more agile, which means that stakeholders need to have better visibility, speed and flexibility . While supply chain digitalization helps...
