published_or_final_version / Urban Planning / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

Transportation is one of the most frequent problems in the business world. The major feature of the problem is that there are many warehouses and many delivery places. The objective of solving this problem is to find the amount of goods that should be sent from each warehouse to each customer while minimizing cost.Unfortunately, understanding the process and interpreting the results are not easy tasks. The method is very complex. The result is in the form of a table. We might say that it is not a friendly user-interface.In this thesis, we will create an application which uses a window as an interface, and uses minimal storage.Borland C++ v.4.0 is chosen to handle the implementation, and Borland Object Windows (class) Library for C++ v.2.0, OWL, is used for the interface. Therefore, this application operates on Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, but not on DOS. / Department of Computer Science

In the distribution network of a large retailer, shipments can either be transported by the retailer's own trucks or outsourced to third-party logistics (3PL) companies. In the former case, shipments are consolidated and transported from their origins through an intermediate facility, namely a crossdock. At a crossdock, shipments are unloaded, sorted, re-consolidated, loaded and transported to their destinations. The consolidation process offers economies of scale that reduce the transportation costs. At the same time, it increases travel distances and incurs handling costs at a crossdock. For this reason, consolidation is uneconomic for a shipment in which origin and destination are located close to one other, especially through a distant crossdock. It is cheaper to outsource transportation of such a shipment to 3PL companies. This shipping decision raises a series of questions. Should a shipment be consolidated through a crossdock or outsourced to 3PL companies? How do facility locations, the operational cost of a crossdock and mode of shipments influence the shipping decision? Can the robustness and potential growth of a crossdock be measured? How does outsourcing affect the robustness and potential growth of a crossdock? We formulate a strategic model of a retailer's distribution network as an economic trade-off between consolidated shipments through a crossdock and outsourced shipments to 3PL companies. We study the locus of facility locations where the costs of a consolidated shipment and an outsourced shipment are equal and discover that the trade-off can be modeled by classical geometric curves, particularly an ellipse, a hyperbola, a limacon and a Cartesian oval. These curves can be developed into a preliminary routing and locating tool. We also observe interesting connections between the single hub crossdocking network and other fields of geometric study, such as Voronoi diagrams and geometric inversion. In addition, the area bounded by these curves represents the likelihood in which a particular shipment is consolidated through a crossdock. We expand this concept to multiple vendor-store pairs and suggest an index that measures robustness and potential growth of a particular crossdock. This asymptotic-probability index explains economic driving factors of consolidation and outsourcing. Although the derivation of the index is limited by the dimension and spatial distribution of facilities, its numerical value can be determined by a computer simulation. Therefore, we use Monte Carlo simulation to compute the proposed index to explain the outsourcing and the interaction between TL threshold0.1 and mode of shipments. The analysis and computer simulation suggest that outsourcing may cause an adverse effect in a single hub crossdocking network, resulting in the abrupt reduction of consolidated shipments in the network. Furthermore, we propose transportation planning to alleviate this effect and compare them to the optimal allocation. The routing and locating application of the model is illustrated using the Home Depot distribution network. Our model predicts 5.5% and additional 1.0% savings in transportation cost by re-allocation of shipments and re-location of crossdocks, respectively. The empirical study shows that the adverse effect of outsourcing can be eliminated by limiting the number of crossdocks used by each store.

Thesis (MComm)--University of Stellenbosch, 2008. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 102-105).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 187-196). Also available online.

This study is designed to gain a better understanding of the decision process of freight shippers who use commercial truckers. Pursuant to this study, it is possible to gather some insights into the phenomenon of the selection of a trucking company to transport goods. Planning is essential to the attainment of goals in any type of firm, and that is especially true in the volatile environment of commercial trucking. Development of the external environment of trucking is prerequisite to the planning process and essential to the attainment of goals. The external environment of a trucking firm is generally represented by economic, social, and political influences, which extend specifically to the nature and tendencies of its markets, i.e., the shippers.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of an intervention designed to eliminate damage notification failures in a customer-specific standard operating procedure used by a global logistics company. Process maps identified locations in the process where damage notification failures could most likely occur. A revised process was designed overnight to eliminate as many notification failure points as possible. In addition, a job aid was included to help facilitate the process change for the drivers. The results of the intervention showed a rapid and profound decrease in damage notification failures leading to the retention of a large, profitable account with a minimal initial investment of time and money.

Recent interest in logistics and physical distribution has fueled a move to position such activities as mainstream marketing functions. Transportation has been of particular interest due to the changes in the regulatory environment in the United States in the last decade. The changes have resulted in an extremely competitive market facing the carriers, and have provided shippers with a strategic opportunity to use physical distribution as a competitive tool in the marketplace. Research in the past in the area of transportation purchasing has focussed on identification of carrier characteristics that are considered important in the selection process. The present study viewed purchasing of transportation as an organizational service buying phenomenon. The carrier selection decision was viewed within the framework of the Sheth (1973) model of industrial buying behavior. Organizational characteristics, environmental variables and source loyalty toward existing Carriers were empirically investigated to determine their influence on the locus of the shippers carrier selection decision. The impact of the variables above on the development of criteria for carrier selection was also investigated. The impact of shippers' source loyalty toward existing carriers on the buyclass variable, and the decision outcome were also investigated. Organizational variables such as terms of shipment used, nature of firms business, and usage of intermodal carriage were found to have significant relationship to the locus of the carrier selection decision. Among environmental variables, sources of information that were utilized had a significant relationship to the locus of the carrier selection decision. Source loyalty toward existing carriers was found to be positively related to the frequency of purchase situations that were classified as routine purchase. Carrier selection criteria used by shipper firms were found to differ as the firms differed in their organization characteristics and environmental variables facing them. The results of the study provide an empirical test of a portion of the industrial buyer behavior model (Sheth 1973). The results provide carrier companies with tools to segment their potential market, and knowledge of the shippers carrier selection decision process. / Ph. D.