Logistics

China plays as a production site as well as supply market and as market for final products for European and American companies an increasing role. The attractiveness for logistics service providers is caused by the gigantic market potential and an enormous market increase. The rise of outsourcing activities of shippers is of special relevance for logistics service providers. Enterprises in the logistics sector are confronted with considerable challenges like quantity and quality of the logistics infrastructure or Guanxi.

Firms are acting more and more in networks, especially in industrial supply chains. Planning and controlling activities are realized in that supply chains e.g. for optimization of inventories. Apart from such advantages there are special risks in supply chains. In that case it is necessary to detect, to estimate and to regulate risks. Processes of control, alignment and regulation are not defined and established so far.

„Available to Promise“ can be regarded as the core concept of Supply Chain Management. It has become an integer part of modern software tools like SAP/APO and is being implemented in a growing number of companies. The author works out the potentialities and possible limitations of this concept and explains what remains to be done in order to make this risk management approach complete.

In Supply Chain Management, the coordination of information-, material- and value streams is of central importance. One possible approach is the Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment Model. In this article, the most important success factors from the areas of data quality, product structure, producer, customer and human factors are presented. A graphical method for assessing efforts and benefits, as well as optimizing the cost-benefit ratio, is presented. The method is verified based on an application example from industry.

This paper focuses on the application of a bee-like autonomous control method to a matrix-like shop floor model with setup times.Apparently present planning and control systems are unable to cope with the new needs for flexiblity and process reliability resulting from dynamics and complexity in the environment. Autonomous control means de-centralized coordination of intelligent logistic objects in a dynamically changing environment. By the aid of a continuous flow simulation the system’s performance will be analyzed in regard to the application effect on throughput times and inventory levels.

Logistics service providers intend to provide their costumers with efficient logistics processes and low-cost services. Besides the classical aspects of the controlling of the material and information flow in the supply chain, logistics service providers have begun in the last years to offer additional value added services to their costumers. The value-orientation of industrial and trading companies has put the demand on logistics service providers to provide logistics solutions for a financial optimisation of the supply chain. This contribution will show a solution in form of the “Supply Chain Finance Cooperation”.

This paper discusses ideas about and experiences with flexible simulation of real-time data streams generated by production networks when state-of-the-art automatic identification and localization technologies are applied. Flexibility here means the possibility to freely define the objects and their related types of events and statuses that are recorded in production and logistics processes. The data streams generated during simulation can be used to test and compare operational control strategies for processes in production networks in an offline or online mode.

Against the background of Basel II it gets more and more important for a company to strengthen its self-financing power to ensure liquidity. You can do this by rising sales, reducing operating expenses or shortening working capital. These levers are positively influenced by Supply Chain Management (SCM). For this reason we pick two concepts of SCM to analyse their impact on the self-financing power.

In production logistics of the machine and tool manufacturig industry RFID-systems are implemented more and more. Enterprises expect an improvement of efficiency in tracing containers and material provision. Implementation of RFID often fails because the processes should be adopted as they are and limits of the technology are not known sufficiently. This article shows the limits of RFID in tracing containers in production and introduces an approach of implementing RFID-supported processes.

The performance measures of a flow line are throughput, work in process and cycle time. Operating curves visualize their interrelations. This article shows how to compute the operating curves analytically using simple queueing models. These models and the resulting operating curves can be used to compute the performance measures of a new or reengineered production system operating under stochastic conditions.