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Thesis/Capstone

Supply Chain Modeling for Temperature-Sensitive Pharmaceutical Goods

Publication Date
The pharmaceutical industry relies on cold chain supply infrastructure to preserve the integrity of temperature-sensitive products. Specifically, passive controlled temperature solutions present an increased challenge as the inherent uncertainty of ambient temperatures and process lead time variations in the delivery dramatically increase the risk of inactivating the product. Despite the...
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Thesis/Capstone

Synchronization of Ocean Export Supply Chain

Publication Date
Ocean freight represents more than 70% of the global trade by volume. Given the price increases in transportation rates, companies are more interested in driving efficiencies and cost optimizations through supply chain synchronization. In this document, synchronization refers to the optimal coordination of transportation costs, inventory, and service level, while...
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Thesis/Capstone

The influence of manager-centric competencies on the performance of micro and small enterprises in Latin America

Publication Date
According to an OECD report, micro and small enterprises (MSEs) constitute 99.5% of all firms in Latin America and employ approximately 60% of the LATAM population. However, despite their economic and social importance, MSEs are subject to high failure rates, primarily stemming from low productivity, lack of managerial skills and...
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Thesis/Capstone

Total Landed Cost Model

Publication Date
As more and more multinational companies are exploring low-cost countries to purchase commodities from, it has become critical for companies to calculate the total landed cost before making a purchasing decision. This capstone project establishes a model for the sourcing team of GE Gas Power to capture costs such as...
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Thesis/Capstone

Transforming eCommerce Product Segmentation with Machine Learning

Publication Date
Inventory management is one of the key elements of supply chain management for any organization to manage costs versus service level tradeoffs. Product segmentation for inventory is therefore a key lever for inventory management. Traditionally, this segmentation is done using only a single criterion. This paper presents a framework that...
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Thesis/Capstone

Trash or Treasure: An Analysis of Airline Catering Food Waste

Publication Date
With air passenger traffic projected to increase significantly over the following decades, the airline catering industry urgently needs to explore the underlying causes of food waste produced in their kitchens and develop concrete strategies to manage it better going forward. Spanning over 60+ countries, operating 200+ catering units, and serving...
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Thesis/Capstone

Uber Freight: Assessment and Determination of Optimal Design Features for a Drop Trailer Service Offering and Network

Publication Date
The trucking industry hauled 72.5% of all freight transported in the U.S. and served an essential function in transporting cargo nationwide from one place to another. Recently, the industry has suffered from significant disruption, such as a shortage of drivers and carriers. One of the leading causes of these issues...
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Thesis/Capstone

Using a Gaussian Mixture Model to measure transit time bimodality and its impact on inventory decisions

Publication Date
Companies make inventory decisions based on well-established safety stock methodologies. In these methodologies, a key assumption is that transit times are normally distributed. Although previous studies have shown a nonnormality in transit time distributions in ocean freight, it is still unclear how transit time is distributed in land freight and...
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Report

Supply Chain Lessons From the War in Ukraine

Publication Date

The MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) convened participants from industry, non-profits, and academia to discuss the effect of the war in Ukraine on global supply chains during the June 2022 Supply Chain Exchange Monthly research briefing, which also served as The MIT Global SCALE Network quarterly webinar.

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Paper

A Framework for Educational Innovation in Logistics and Supply Chain Management, a Research Agenda

Publication Date
This work presents a conceptual framework for educational innovation within Logistics and Supply Chain Management (LSCM) to develop relevant learning experiences in the discipline. Nowadays, education is shifting from traditional passive approaches in which students listen and see into active settings involving learn-by-doing real-life experiences to develop appropriate competencies. LSCM...
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Paper

Feed The Future Uganda Market System Monitoring: Final Report

Publication Date
This report was prepared for the United States Agency for International Development. Implemented by USAID/Uganda Feed the Future Market System Monitoring Activity, headquartered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and The George Washington University (GWU). Read the full report here
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Paper

Design of a two-echelon last-mile delivery model

Publication Date
Due to high congestion in cities and growing demand for last-mile delivery services, several companies have been implementing two-echelon distribution strategies over the past few years. Notably, the installation of urban transshipment points has gained increasing attention, used by logistics operators to transfer goods from large freight trucks to smaller...
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Report

Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic Impact on Supply Chains webinar

Publication Date

In March 2022, the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) convened participants from industry, non-profits, and academia, for a webinar hosted by the MIT Global SCALE Network, to discuss how the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, in all its variants, has rattled global supply chains with shockwave disruptions up, down, and sideways along the chains in a phenomenon known as the Bullwhip Effect.

elsevier
Paper

Taking action to reduce dropout in MOOCs: Tested interventions

Publication Date
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have democratized access to higher education, but low entry and exit barriers make dropout rates in these courses much higher than in traditional in-person courses. Previous research has explored the main factors driving student dropout and proposed predictive models to identify students at risk. However...
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Paper

Applications and Research avenues for drone-based models in logistics: A classification and review

Publication Date
The operational design and planning of drone-based logistics models is a rapidly growing area of scientific research. In this paper, we present a structured, comprehensive, and scalable framework for classifying drone-based delivery systems and their associated routing problems along with a comprehensive review and synthesis of the extant academic literature...
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Report

State of Supply Chain Sustainability 2021

Publication Date

Last year, when the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic was still escalating, we expected the crisis to dampen companies’ enthusiasm for investing in supply chain sustainability (SCS). Enterprises would surely divert all their attention to combating the pandemic. Remarkably, the survey results suggest that Covid-19 did not significantly slow the push to make supply chains more sustainable. More than 80% of survey respondents in this year’s report claimed the crisis had no impact or increased their firm’s commitments to SCS.

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Paper

The competitiveness of fair trade and organic versus conventional coffee based on consumer panel data

Publication Date
This paper analyzed the competitiveness of premium and regular Fair Trade and Organic (FTO) coffees relative to conventional coffee using consumer panel data. The coffees were categorized into four groups based on their certification labels and prices: Premium or Regular Conventional, and Premium or Regular FTO. Competitiveness was measured in...
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Thesis/Capstone

Adaptability of Manufacturing Operations through Digital Twins

Publication Date
Manufacturing companies are under pressure to build faster and more efficient decision-making capabilities due to the rapidly changing customer demand and expectations. The conventional analytical models are no longer sufficient to capture the complexities of the supply chain. Companies are looking to embark in a digital transformation to address these...
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Thesis/Capstone

Advancing the Circular Economy of Plastics through eCommerce

Publication Date
The production growth and short life cycle of plastics has created concerns around its waste management process. Despite efforts to increase recycling over the years, the rate of recycling does not come close to the rate of plastics production. This capstone project develops an innovative and convenient business model that...
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Thesis/Capstone

Automation of Warehouse Decision Making

Publication Date
This capstone addresses how an FMCG company should go about automating inbound decision making in one of their warehouses. The capstone focuses only on the inbound side of the distribution center because it was determined that it was an area with big opportunities for improvement. Efficiency inside a warehouse depends...
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Thesis/Capstone

Carbon Efficient Network Design: Evaluating The Trade-Offs Between Carbon Emissions, Transportation Cost, and Delivery Time For a Middle-Mile Distribution Network

Publication Date
The transportation sector is the third largest contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, accounting for over 28% of total U.S. emissions and over 14% of global emissions in 2018. As climate change and its negative effects have grown significantly, efforts to reduce GHG emissions have become an important objective on...
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Channel Flow Optimization for Product Allocation in Grocery Retail

Publication Date
Supply chain networks in the retail industry have become increasingly complex, giving rise to challenges in product flow from distribution centers to fulfillment locations. Product allocation, in particular, has emerged as a critical challenge for grocery retail companies as it helps them determine the shipping location and the shipping type...
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Thesis/Capstone

Defining and Detecting Churn in Truckload Transportation

Publication Date
The truckload transportation industry is an established industry, in the US, with annual revenue for for-hire truckload reaching greater than 300 billion dollars in 2019. A major problem encountered by for-hire truckload carriers is a sudden, unexpected and sustained reduction in shipment volume over lanes referred to as ‘churn’. Churn...
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Thesis/Capstone

Delivering Locally Sourced Nutritious Food to Indian Households

Publication Date
WHO reports that in the South Asian region, the number of undernourished has hardly decreased in the last decade. This situation calls for a concerted effort to combat malnutrition the world over. The effort must be grounded in nutrition and executed through a robust distribution mechanism to reach all segments...
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Thesis/Capstone

Demand Forecasting for Food-Rations at the United Nations Darfur Mission

Publication Date
Demand planning is a challenging component for organizations across a broad spectrum of industries. A key element of a successful demand plan is accurate forecasting, due in part to the operational decisions that are made based on the results of forecasting models. This is what our capstone project sponsor, Agility...