International Logistics

In this study guide the essence, the basic conceptions and the role of international logistics in economic development, the international and organizational aspects of procurement logistics, international warehousing, conceptual foundations of distribution logistics and inernational transport logistics are examined. This study guide is intended for students of specialty “International Economic Relations”

The impact of investments on e-grocery logistics operations

In recent years, various business models have been implemented in e-grocery retailing, however, in most cases, without success. The biggest stumbling block has been logistics, and some inefficient operation has frequently led to capital being used up on operating expenses. Therefore, improving overall logistical efficiency can be seen as one of the most important steps towards profitability. This dissertation aims at understanding different e-grocery logistics system implementation alternatives. The main objective is to study how best to implement an e-grocery business from the logistical point of view so as to ensure profitability. The second objective is to identify, model, and evaluate different logistical solutions that can be used in e-grocery retailing. Solutions for achieving greater picking efficiency are presented and modelled. Special attention is paid to investments in the automation of picking. Different unattended reception solutions and revenue models are identified and examined. The potential of the revenue models is evaluated with modelling and concrete examples. The last objective is to find and evaluate cost-effective combinations of logistical solutions in different market situations so as to enable the successful implementation of an e-grocery business. According to the results, the general rule that cost savings in picking cannot be realised with automation if demand and capacity utilisation varies significantly applies also to the e-grocery business. Therefore, the focus should be more on creating a flexible distribution centre with manual solutions. Another result suggests that shared reception boxes with an open system have the potential to be profitable as a part of the e-grocery logistics system. However, customer demand is currently uncertain and therefore capacity utilisation is crucial. Finally, the way in which the order of implementing logistical solutions affects e-grocery business investment is presented. The flexibility of individual solutions and solutions' inter-dependencies when choosing an investment strategy are discussed.reviewe

Supply chain considerations for electronic grocery shopping

The main hypothesis of the dissertation is that "e-grocery with home delivery can be more efficient than supermarket retailing handling a similar volume of sales". The e-grocery business should be seen as an assembly industry producing shopping baskets. Only in this way can the new electronic channel work efficiently. The e-grocery business is usually seen as a supermarket copied into an electronic form; it is seen only as an opportunity to buy products. Instead, the starting point of operational design should be the real needs of a household and take into account the possibility of adding new services for the customers. One of the conclusions of this research is that the operational costs of a distribution centre can be lower than those of a supermarket. Store-based order picking is less expensive than using a specialised distribution centre when turnover is less than one million euros. A turnover of more than 3 million euros means that a dedicated distribution centre appears to be more efficient than store-based picking. However, the distribution centre has to be purpose-built for shopping basket assembly with a reasonably stable workload. A combination of store-based picking and a specialised distribution centre has been introduced as an opportunity to create gradual low-risk growth in the e-grocery business. It seems that efficient home delivery can be achieved even with a moderate market share. Unattended reception is very important for the overall cost structure of the supply chain and enable service models that give flexibility in route planning and optimisation. However, the investments that unattended reception requires should also be taken into account. The cost efficiency of a home delivery service model can be described by the average mileage driven per order, which directly correlates with the number of stops per hour. New efficiency indicators are needed to measure the efficiency of the e-grocery business. Sales per distribution centre and sales per square kilometre are useful indicators when choosing home delivery service models and potential market areas. The most useful factor is sales per square kilometre. The critical sales volume appears to be 200,000 euros per square kilometre per annum. This sales volume can be achieved with 25 four-person households per square kilometre with 90 percent purchase loyalty. E-grocery retailing is a very local business and store-based picking is a good alternative if fast roll-out with a low level of investment is required. A distribution centre-based operation is potentially much more efficient, but it is a slower approach and needs more investment. Whatever service model is chosen, it should first be made to work in a fairly compact geographical area and then copied to new areas.reviewe

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Strategic Corporate Research Report

[Excerpt] Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (hereinafter Wal-Mart) is the second-largest company in the world. It has more annual revenue than the GDP of Switzerland. It sells more DVDs, magazines, books, CDs, dog food, diapers, bicycles, toys, toothpaste, jewelry, and groceries than any other retailer does worldwide. It is the largest retailer in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the second-largest in the United Kingdom, and the third largest in Brazil, With its partners, it is the largest retailer in Central America. Wal-Mart is also the largest private employer in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and it has 1.8 million employees around the globe. Wal-Mart is so huge that it effectively sets the terms for large swaths of the global economy, from retail wages to apparel prices to transoceanic shipping rates to the location of toy factories. Indeed, if there is one single aspect to understand about the company, it is the fact that Wal-Mart is transforming the relations of production in virtually every product category it sells, through its relationships with suppliers. But its influence goes far beyond the economy. It sets social policy by refusing to sell certain types of birth control. Its construction of supercenters molds the landscape, shapes traffic patterns, and alters the local commercial mix. The retail goliath shapes culture by selling the music of patriotic country singer Garth Brooks but not the critical (and hilarious) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (the Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction. It influences politics by donating millions to conservative politicians and think tanks. Wal-Mart is, in short, one of the most powerful entities in the world. Not surprisingly, Wal-Mart has developed a long list of critics, including unions, human rights organizations, religious groups, environmental activists, community organizations, small business groups, academics, children’s rights groups, and even institutional investors. These groups have exposed the company’s illegal union-busting tactics, its many violations of overtime laws, its abuse of child labor, its egregious healthcare policies, its super-exploitation of immigrant workers, its rampant gender discrimination, the horrific labor conditions at its suppliers’ factories, and its unlawful environmental degradation. They have also chronicled the deleterious effect Wal-Mart has on the public coffers and the quality of community life. New Wal-Mart stores and distribution centers often swallow up government subsidies and tax breaks, take public land, create more congestion, reduce overall wages, destroy retail variety, and increase public outlays for healthcare. To its critics, Wal-Mart represents the worst aspects of 21st-eentury capitalism. Wal-Mart usually counters any criticism with two words: low prices. It is a powerful mantra in a consumerist world. The company does make more products affordable to more people, and that is nothing to sneeze at when wages are stagnant, jobs insecure, pensions disappearing, and health coverage shrinking. With low prices, Wal-Mart helps working men and women get more from their meager paychecks, more necessities like bread, and more luxuries, like roses, too. It is a brilliant and incontrovertible argument, and Wal-Mart’s most ardent defenders take it even farther. They say its obsession with low prices makes the entire economy more efficient and more productive. Suppliers and competitors have to produce more and better products with the same resources, and that redounds to everyone. In the micro, it means falling prices and rising product quality. In the macro, it means economic growth, more jobs, and higher tax revenues. To its defenders, Wal-Mart represents the best aspects of 21st-century capitalism. Despite their radical opposition, critics and defenders of the world’s largest corporation agree on one thing: Wal-Mart represents 21st-century capitalism. It symbolizes a system of increasing market penetration and decreasing social regulation, where more and more aspects of life around the world are subject to economic competition. Wal-Mart’s success rests upon the ongoing destruction of social power in favor of corporate power. It takes advantage of the conditions of the neo-liberal world, from the availability of instant and inexpensive global communication to the continuing collapse of agricultural employment around the world to the rapid diffusion of technological innovation to the oversupply of subjugated migrant labor in nearly every country to the continued existence of undemocratic and corporate-dominated governments. For some, this is as it should be, all part of capitalism’s natural and ultimately benign development. For the rest of us, Wal-Mart is at the heart of what is wrong with the world

Sustainable Industrial Engineering along Product-Service Life Cycle/Supply Chain

Sustainable industrial engineering addresses the sustainability issue from economic, environmental, and social points of view. Its application fields are the whole value chain and lifecycle of products/services, from the development to the end-of-life stages. This book aims to address many of the challenges faced by industrial organizations and supply chains to become more sustainable through reinventing their processes and practices, by continuously incorporating sustainability guidelines and practices in their decisions, such as circular economy, collaboration with suppliers and customers, using information technologies and systems, tracking their products’ life-cycle, using optimization methods to reduce resource use, and to apply new management paradigms to help mitigate many of the wastes that exist across organizations and supply chains. This book will be of interest to the fast-growing body of academics studying and researching sustainability, as well as to industry managers involved in sustainability management

Data-driven System Design in Service Operations

The service industry has become an increasingly important component in the world's economy. Simultaneously, the data collected from service systems has grown rapidly in both size and complexity due to the rapid spread of information technology, providing new opportunities and challenges for operations management researchers. This dissertation aims to explore methodologies to extract information from data and provide powerful insights to guide the design of service delivery systems. To do this, we analyze three applications in the retail, healthcare, and IT service industries. In the first application, we conduct an empirical study to analyze how waiting in queue in the context of a retail store affects customers' purchasing behavior. The methodology combines a novel dataset collected via video recognition technology with traditional point-of-sales data. We find that waiting in queue has a nonlinear impact on purchase incidence and that customers appear to focus mostly on the length of the queue, without adjusting enough for the speed at which the line moves. We also find that customers' sensitivity to waiting is heterogeneous and negatively correlated with price sensitivity. These findings have important implications for queueing system design and pricing management under congestion. The second application focuses on disaster planning in healthcare. According to a U.S. government mandate, in a catastrophic event, the New York City metropolitan areas need to be capable of caring for 400 burn-injured patients during a catastrophe, which far exceeds the current burn bed capacity. We develop a new system for prioritizing patients for transfer to burn beds as they become available and demonstrate its superiority over several other triage methods. Based on data from previous burn catastrophes, we study the feasibility of being able to admit the required number of patients to burn beds within the critical three-to-five-day time frame. We find that this is unlikely and that the ability to do so is highly dependent on the type of event and the demographics of the patient population. This work has implications for how disaster plans in other metropolitan areas should be developed. In the third application, we study workers' productivity in a global IT service delivery system, where service requests from possibly globally distributed customers are managed centrally and served by agents. Based on a novel dataset which tracks the detailed time intervals an agent spends on all business related activities, we develop a methodology to study the variation of productivity over time motivated by econometric tools from survival analysis. This approach can be used to identify different mechanisms by which workload affects productivity. The findings provide important insights for the design of the workload allocation policies which account for agents' workload management behavior

Lean enterprise distribution tactics with customer supply chain integrations

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering; in conjunction with the Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (p. 108-118).by Eric A. White.S.M.M.B.A

Materiaalivirtojen parantamista sähköisten ketjunostinten tuotannolle

This thesis was made for the industrial crane manufacturer Konecranes to find areas of material flow improvement for large electrical chain hoist production. Instead of targeting a specific production line for the improvement, the thesis focused on investigating improved material flow and layout designs for electric chain hoist production in general, while referencing an existing production line. An electric chain hoist production line at Hämeenlinna had been under ramp-down for small frame hoists. This created an opportunity to focus on improving the remaining large frame hoist production material flow. The knowledge gained from visiting the pro-duction line and participating in a production line development project was essential for the author to have sufficient competency towards determining the areas of material flow improvement. The methods used for the research included a literature review to identify the factors affecting material flow. The literature review also compiled frameworks, guidelines, and case examples for designing, visualizing, and improving layouts and material flows. Along with a current state analysis of the product and production line, the thesis used frameworks from literature to determine what changes or logistics concepts could be implemented to improve the current production process material flow. The data for calculating capacity requirements for electric chain hoist production were collected from Konecranes database, and the results from the investigation were compared with the results from the development project and the state of electric chain hoist production in summer, 2021. The material flow investigation resulted in two improved layout designs and material flow concepts to account for two demand scenarios. Main findings for improving material flow included changes to assembly order, picking process, stored material quantity, buffer storage and workcenter placement, and layout to account for increased demand. The methods used in this thesis provide a systematic process for finding improvements for a production process material flow and the results highlight further production development opportunities for Konecranes.Tämä opinnäytetyö tehtiin nosturivalmistaja Konecranesille materiaalivirtojen parannuskohteiden löytämiseksi suurten sähköisten ketjunostinten tuotannossa. Sen sijaan, että työssä parannettaisiin tiettyä tuotantolinjaa, tutkimus keskittyy parannettujen materiaalivirtojen ja layout-suunnitelmien selvittämiseen ketjunostintuotannolle yleisellä tasolla hyödyntäen olemassa olevaa tuotantolinjaa. Ketjunostinten tuotantolinja Hämeenlinnassa on ollut alasajon alla kohdistuen pieniin ketjunostimiin. Tämän ansiosta voitiin keskittyä tuotantoon jäävien suurten ketjunostinten materiaalivirtojen kehittämiseen. Työn tekijä keräsi tietotaitoa osallistumalla nostinten asennukseen sekä paikalliseen kehitysprojektiin tehtaalla, mikä oli elintärkeää päätösten teossa materiaalivirtojen parannuskohteita selvittäessä. Tutkimuksen kirjallisuusselvityksessä määriteltiin materiaalivirtoihin vaikuttavia tekijöitä, malleja, ohjesääntöjä sekä esimerkkitutkimuksia liittyen materiaalivirtojen ja layout-mallien suunnitteluun, visualisointiin ja parantamiseen. Kehityssuunnitelma saatiin aikaiseksi hyödyntäen tuoterakennetta, tuotannon nykyistä tilaa ja kirjallisuudesta saatuja malleja. Kapasiteettivaatimuslaskuissa käytetyt arvot olivat peräisin Konecranesin tietokannasta. Tuloksia selvityksestä vertailtiin myös ketjunostintuotannon kehitysprojektia edeltäneen ja jälkeisen tilan kanssa. Selvitys johti kahteen parannettuun layout-malliin ja materiaalivirtakonseptiin vastaten kahta kysyntätilannetta. Päälöydökset materiaalivirtojen parantamiseksi käsittelivät muutoksia kokoonpanojärjestykseen, keräilyprosessiin, materiaalien säilytysmääriin, välivarastojen ja työpisteiden sijaintiin ja layout-malliin kysynnän kasvaessa. Opinnäytetyössä käytetyt keinot tarjoavat järjestelmällisen tavan selvittää tuotannon materiaalivirtojen parannuskohteita ja tutkimuksen tuloksena nostettiin esiin ketjunostintuotannon kehitysmahdollisuuksia Konecranesin hyväksi

Spartan Daily, May 14, 1996

Volume 106, Issue 70https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/8855/thumbnail.jp

Spatial implications of organisational and technological change in Japanese retailing

In 1960 department stores were the sole form of large-scale retailing in Japan. The retail industry was otherwise comprised of a very large number of small firms. Two significant trends have occurred since 1960. First, there was the emergence of new large-scale retail formats and their subsequent growth. Second, there was the development of large organisations operating on a multiple store basis. New organisational forms evolved including superstore and supermarket chains, and speciality chain stores. Geographical and historical factors were first examined that have affected the structure of the modern Japanese retail industry. A framework embodying the concepts of threats and opportunities was then used to identify forces that have influenced organisational and technical change since 1960. The following "Threats and Opportunities" were analysed: The Economic Climate. The Changing Japanese Consumer. Technological Change. Relationships Between Retailers and Wholesalers. Changes in Commercial Land Use. Government Policy and Legislation. Major structural trends within retailing during the period 1972-1985 were then examined, through an analysis of 29 retail categories in the Census of Distribution for the period 1972-1985. A sample of nine categories was chosen for, a more detailed analysis, using thematic maps, to show the geographic distribution of outlets in 1985 and selected changes since 1972. One of these categories was comprised of large stores including superstores and many supermarkets. It figured prominently within the changes described in the analysis. The leading six superstore/supermarket companies, by sales February 1986, formed the subjects of case studies, with the objective of obtaining insights into the spatial implications of organisational and technological change within these examples of large-scale retail companies. Their development was described, including their expansion through diversification. The Chandler Thesis was selected, and found to be an appropriate model, in considering the organisational changes occuring within these companies. Finally, some international comparisons were made