Alignment of Planning and Execution Models in Distribution Networks


Speaker


Abstract

In Supply Chain Management practitioners and operations researchers have traditionally been focused on optimizing planning decisions. Today, technological developments like the Internet, GPS, and ERP systems have reached a mature state and are wide used, offering all actors in the supply chain the opportunity to act more spontaneously. In recent years we have also seen that competition has become stronger (in particular in the manufacturing and the service industries) and this has put a lot of pressure on companies to design processes where they are able to respond to changing circumstances much faster than before. This has raised many new interesting decision problems that arise during execution.
 

In this seminar we present an execution problem that can be found in inventory networks where demand can be fulfilled from more than one stocking location and we present heuristic solution procedures from Axsater (2003), and Minner et al (2003). In this execution problem the task is to select the stocking location that ships the parts in order to fulfill customer demand. Inspired by one of Minner's suggestions for future research, we will then extend our scope to the planning problem of optimizing replenishment decisions. Naturally, this raises the question if (and to what extend) knowledge about the execution model should be used when solving the planning problem. In the remainder of the seminar we will discuss existing literature on the joint optimization of planning and execution and identify interesting opportunities for future work. When discussing and comparing various solutions for the joint optimization problem we will special attention to the level of anticipation that has been used. We think that the level of anticipation provides an interesting perspective to look at the existing literature as there is no common opinion on how to deal with this.

 
Contact information:

Moritz Fleischmann

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