Logistics

„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.

Autonomously controlled transportation processes require decision making of logistic objects regarding routing alternatives. In this contribution a multicriterial evaluation assessment procedure is introduced basing on the fuzzy hierarchical aggregation, adapted and further developed at the CRC 637 “Autonomous Control of Logistic Processes” at Bremen University. The main design focus was user-friendliness within autonomous control and other fields of application. The example of use is a hierarchical structure of the subcriteria characterising the routing alternatives of an autonomous package. It is shown that the procedure can consider unprecise and fuzzy formulated knowledge directly in the model, while parameter adjusting was reduced to a minimum. Different weightings and compensation effects of subcriteria are depicted. The contribution shows the evaluation on a two-subcriteria basis and the possibilities of multicriterial evaluation as well. The evaluation of hard and soft ...

Production logistics has seen the introduction of autonomous control strategies, which had been implemented with different modelling methods. Additionally a standardising body of tools for the evaluation of autonomous control strategies has been set up. This article presents a framework, which helps to identify the appropriate autonomous control strategy together with the corresponding modelling approach for given production logistics scenarios.

The growing tendency to outsource logistics has been postulated for many years. The unrealised outsourcing potential in Europe has, however, been growing since the last 3-5 years. According to a recent survey a realistic outsourcing potential of 16 billions can be attributed to the German logistics market alone. Insufficient competence of Third Party Logistics (TPL) providers has been postulated as one of the underlying reasons for not realising this enormous market potential. Based on the results of a case study this paper presents a model for contract logistics competence and shows how much the expectations towards the logistics providers can differ from logistics providers’ self assessment.

Advanced Planning or Supply Chain Planning constitutes a sub-task of Supply Chain Management. It focuses on planning of operational processes, and hence has its primary area of application in manufacturing and distribution of physical products. Advanced Planning Systems (APS) build upon databases of ERP systems. They enhance the latter by a concept of hierarchical planning which makes use of modern methods as developed in Operations Research and related fields. This article gives an overview of solution methods implemented in APS and modelling capabilities.

The implementation of object-identification without contact by Radio Frequency Identification technology (RFID) is in the meantime taken into consideration by many small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to enhance on the one hand their internal workflows in production and logistics and on the other hand to satisfy customer demands. However, in the last years only little or superficial knowledge of this technology has been acquired. Hence, qualified and certified training for dealing with RFID is highly necessary. Process security shall thus be guaranteed internally and uniform standards within the supply chain regarding the implementation and application of RFID, can be substantiated.

For the implementation of autonomous control of transport processes it is tried to transfer well known and approved routing protocols from data communication to transport problems. Here structural differences between data and transportation networks prevent a direct transfer of the protocols, so that several different, particularly adapted protocols with different targets must cooperate in transportation networks. In the following a concept for autonomous controlled transport networks, called “Distributed Logistics Routing Protocol”, is introduced, developed at the CRC 637 “Autonomous Control of Logistic Processes” in Bremen.

We consider a network of transport service providers where transport orders can be exchanged between carrier organisations. For an efficient allocation of the transport orders we propose a bargaining mechanism to be implemented in an exchange market. In order to evaluate possible exchanges of transport orders between carriers we calculate the individual contribution margins of orders on the basis of solving a routing problem. The paper investigates the impact of this strategy on the total profit achieved in the transportation network.

The necessity to gain detailed knowledge about existing business processes is increasing continuously along with the complexity of the supply networks. The centre of the approach is therefore the modelling of inter-company business processes. Starting from the current requirements of the industry, the article describes a modelling method, which satisfies these demands while considering the supply feasibility. The presented modelling method is specified in the context of inter-company process controlling. Keywords: