Customer service is increasingly being recognized as a source of competitive advantage. Determining customer needs accurately, meeting and exceeding them in a consistent manner is the key to the effective customer service. Companies should adapt a strategic, proactive focus on customer service based on understanding logistics process and designing logistics system to meet their needs. This ...

The design of closed-loop logistics (forward and reverse logistics) has attracted growing attention with the stringent pressures of customer expectations, environmental concerns and economic factors. This paper considers a multi-product, multi-period and multi-objective closed-loop logistics network model with regard to facility expansion as a facility location–allocation problem, which more cl...

Recently, M&A between companies that produce similar products have been carried out quite often with the intention of improving efficiency and economies of scale. In this paper, a case study is conducted on an M&A model for a Japanese tire company. This model can be formulated as a large-scale mixed integer programming problem. A new formulation and approximate solution method with a tabu searc...

Simple logistics strategies such as "carry-along" and Earth-based "resupply" were sufficient for past human space programs. Next-generation space logistics paradigms are expected to be more complex, involving multiple exploration destinations and insitu resource utilization (ISRU). Optional ISRU brings additional complexity to the interplanetary supply chain network design problem. This paper p...

Customer service is increasingly being recognized as a source of competitive advantage. Determining customer needs accurately, meeting and exceeding them in a consistent manner is the key to the effective customer service. Companies should adapt a strategic, proactive focus on customer service based on understanding logistics process and designing logistics system to meet their needs. This ...

The present study implements a generic methodology for describing and analyzing demand supply networks, that is, networks from a company’s suppliers to its customers. There can be many possible demand supply networks with different logistics costs for a product. Therefore, we introduce a Petri Net-based formalism, and a reachability analysis based algorithm that finds the optimum demand supply ...

Taiwan’s manufacturing capability is always the most internationally competitive. However, in recent years, because of the high labor and land costs in Taiwan, Taiwanese enterprises have been forced to move overseas such as Southeast Asia. When the Taiwanese enterprises invest in Southeast Asia, how to select an appropriate logistics service provider becomes a very important issue. Combining th...

In order to solve the optimization problem of logistics distribution system for fresh food, this paper provides a low-carbon and environmental protection point of view, based on the characteristics of perishable products, and combines with the overall optimization idea of cold chain logistics distribution network, where the green and low-carbon location-routing problem (LRP) model in cold chain...

In manufacturing and distribution, a core process is logistics, and the cost of logistics is roughly 10% of GDP in the US. Designing, managing, and improving industrial logistics systems has never been more challenging, or more critical to competitive success. Fortunately, rapid advance in computational technology promises to provide industrial logistics system designers the kinds of design too...