The tender rejection rate by primary carriers for the TMC division of CH Robinson nearly doubled from 2015-16 to 2017-18. An increase in tender rejection rates directly results in an increase in transportation costs for shippers. Increasing demand in the market from 2015 to 2018 was a major cause of...
Same-day delivery is an increasingly relevant logistics service because of a continued boom in e- commerce. As customer orders are submitted dynamically during the day, companies need to dispatch vehicles from distribution centers to fulfill these orders as they come in. Given their advantages over conventional vehicles such as direct...
The assortment of products that a company offers is one aspect that affects the complexity of their supply chain: the greater number of products, the greater the complexity. This project aims to measure how reducing the number of products affect the multi-compartment fleet size in a construction chemical industry company...
The United States freight spot market moves in patterns consistent with general economic fluctuations within the broader macro-economy. While the spot market does follow general trends, there is an underlying belief that pricing fluctuations occur as a result of external events. These external events, such as natural disasters, market holidays...
Complexity arises as products can take multiple transportation paths that flow from manufacturing sites through to different distribution centers and onward to the end customer destination. Changing transportation costs and volatile tariff rates exacerbate this complexity, as established product flows may become sub-optimal from a cost perspective. Optimization models can...
Americans are the second largest consumers of seafood globally but more than 90% of the seafood consumed is imported, causing the seafood supply chain to be long, opaque, and complex. This gives rise to several concerns such as intentional mislabeling, species substitution, illegal unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, unsustainable fishing...
Innovation Strategies: Upcycling can take sustainable supply chains beyond recycling The industry can improve its environmental performance by increasing the volume of product it recycles. But there is another, less well-known strategy available that is attracting attention: upcycling.
Abstract: Exploring Blockchain-based smart contracts: We explore how blockchain-based smart contracts may automate the monitoring and execution of demurrage clauses in logistics. Building on the legal framework for the ocean transportation of bulk commodities, we outline the benefits and challenges in streamlining the demurrage process. Our findings suggest that while...
Fulfillment strategies that offer consumers a consistent shopping experience across different channels and devices through a variety of last-mile delivery options have emerged as a powerful engine for growth in the retail sector. To thrive in this new environment, retailers need to (re)configure their last-mile supply networks to achieve better...
Although the benefits of horizontal collaboration have been well documented in the literature, research has yet to offer a detailed understanding of the mechanisms that firms employ to create successful horizontal collaboration. Further, the role of logistics clusters in facilitating horizontal collaboration is crucial but not clear yet. This paper...
How Relevant is Latin America? Challenges and Opportunities. Latin America is a well recognized and growing market, but its poor infrastructure, explosive urbanization, expensive and inefficient logistics, and multiple social problems continue to pose major problems to logistics professionals and academics. The uniqueness and complexity of these issues have long...
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...
