Ongoing humanitarian operations can suffer from the lack of medical item availability. The central problem thus becomes how to ensure the right item in the right place at the right time while maintaining appropriate costs. By means of a case study, this research grouped items by various item characteristics and...
According to a report by A. T. Kearney, in 2016 the US business spent $1,392.64B on logistics costs. 90% of transportation spending is procured in the form of Long Term Contracts. A Long Term Contract drives long procurement cycles that can last over 6 months, which results in significant financial...
Excess inventory is prevalent in both the armed forces and defense companies; it takes up space and resources that could be used elsewhere. This thesis proposes a method to reduce the excess inventory and associated costs, while maintaining instant part availability, despite design changes which alter the number of parts...
Supply chains are facing increasingly volatile environments. Traditional optimization solutions provide a baseline understanding for industry applications, but cost-efficient solutions require a more robust approach. In high-tech capital construction projects, the construction of facilities requires complex project schedules, forecast well in advance. These forecasts are used to hire contract workers...
This research analyzed freight performance to determine the groupings of attributes that influence carrier performance. Binary logistic regression and hierarchical clustering were used to identify individual and groupings of freight attributes that impacted performance success in terms of on time delivery, on time pick up, and first tender acceptance rate...
Supply chain visibility is critical for businesses to manage their operational risks. Availability of high quality and timely data regarding shipments is a precursor for supply chain visibility. This thesis analyses the errors that occur in shipment data for a freight forwarder. In this study, two types of errors are...
Traditionally, production and transportation planning processes are managed separately in organizations. In such arrangements, order processing, load planning, and transportation scheduling are often done sequentially, which can be time consuming. Establishing a proactive steady flow of products between two nodes of a supply chain can bypass this order-plan-ship process. A...
The oil and gas industry is characterized by unpredictable boom and busts cycles. Companies must manage capacity to be able to quickly meet increasing demand during boom cycles and survive when oil prices go down. During this time, companies resort to in-house sourcing (“Make”) or buying externally (“Buy”) from suppliers...
Due to the long lead times and complexity in drug development and approval processes, pharmaceutical companies use long range planning to plan their production for the next 10 years. Capacity planning is largely driven by the long-term demand and its forecast uncertainty. The impact of uncertainties at manufacturing level, such...
The security alarms services market in the United States delivers hardware equipment and services to homeowners and businesses to help monitor and enhance personal property protection. Customer satisfaction via wait time reduction, first call resolution, and cost minimization are key drivers of success to players in this market. Most companies...
Returnable Transport Items (RTI) are a critical component of domestic and international trade. The large variability in the geographic supply and demand of goods shipped using RTI impacts the items overall availability at different locations within a network. This research focuses on improving our partner firm’s RTI inventory supply in...
In manufacturing companies, production strategies prioritize maximizing line efficiency which favors large lot sizes and few setups. On the other hand, logistics strategies prioritize minimizing inventory costs which favors smaller lot sizes and more setups. This thesis provides a new mixed integer linear model formulation that optimizes lot sizes such...
Medical devices companies struggle to balance between inventory and service performance, as the products are non-interchangeable and inventory investment is expensive. To find the right level of inventory, we first used unsupervised clustering method to find demand pattern uncertainty for each product. Then, we developed a simulation-based approach to determine...
Drug counterfeiting is one of the major issues in the pharmaceutical industry across the world. These products could cause damages from ineffective treatments to death of patients. In order to fight against counterfeit drugs, the US government introduced Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) mandating that all prescription drugs should...
Transportation cost is one of the major costs in supply chain. Companies need to optimize every aspect of the transportation process to reduce the total logistics cost. A key aspect is optimal mode selection to minimize the cost of every lane in a company’s transportation network. The traditional approach is...
Supply chains in the pharmaceutical industry are growing increasingly more complex and expanding their geographic reach both in manufacturing production and to the end consumer, the patient. Physical development, manufacturing and distribution of these drugs, both of biologics and small molecules, is extremely technical in science and processes. Additionally, the...
Many businesses struggle to optimize the flow of inventory and finished goods through existing plants and facilities. The integration of inventory costs, organizational processes, and changing business dynamics make it difficult to determine the optimal flow. This thesis examines the flow of raw materials and finished goods through the supply...
On-time delivery is a key metric in the trucking segment of the transportation industry. If on-time delivery can be predicted, more effective resource allocation can be achieved. This research focuses on building a predictive analytics model, specifically logistic regression, given a historical dataset. The model, developed using six explanatory variables...
High volatility in order patterns leads to supply chain wide inefficiencies and high operational costs. This issue is particularly common in the consumer goods industry due to large numbers of SKUs under management and frequent promotions. By leveling out the number of weekly shipments (containing constant quantitates of top selling...
This thesis explores the impact of the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) on various stakeholders in the pharmaceutical supply chain. Specific attention has been dedicated to the impact on manufacturers and distributors/retailers. Although various interpretations of the DSCSA are possible, this thesis takes the perspective of a centralized data...
For companies with a large number of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs), it is extremely challenging, if not impossible, to manage the SKUs individually. Therefore, companies stratify SKUs into different classes and manage them by class. Currently, most companies identify SKU stratification based on the single factor of sales volume. This...
Logistics providers process millions of packages daily and collect an incredible amount of data from these shipments. As new sensors are added to more and more packages, companies will now have increasingly fast access to even more data. However, how will logistics companies leverage this idea of big data to...
Pharmaceutical supply chains are strictly regulated and work within unique constraints. Traditionally, innovator companies that are manufacturing the product have no direct interaction with the end users (treatment sites or individual patients); rather, over 90% of the orders go through intermediary wholesalers and distributors. However, with the introduction of new...
The United States has one of the safest drug supply chains in the world. However, its security is threatened by new challenges such as counterfeit, diverted, and illegally imported drugs. To counter the new challenges, the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) was signed into law by President Obama on...
Large pharmaceutical companies struggle to find innovative ways to reduce work-in- process inventory in their production facilities. In our research, we focus on the tradeoff between inventory and production capacity through investing in new facilities and equipment. This tradeoff will depend on the company’s objectives and what it is willing...
