An Operation Capacity Study For An Air Cargo Operation Center

Logistics industry belongs to service industry with manufacturing characteristics. For a long time, the operation management doesn't develop well, which seriously limits the growth of the industry and lead to high social logistics costs and low service efficiency. The overall service level of the logistics industry is determined by the service level of every single process, especially on the critical nodes in the network. Therefore, our focus is on the operation center, specifically, on its operation capacity.Operation capacity is a key index of a company's ROI, as well as an important reference for production planning and resource management. Without accurate analysis of operation capacity and building a capacity database, we cannot make good production-planning decisions. Capacity assessment is a fundamental work to support the optimization of operation. The capacity assessment process is therefore the process of a thorough improvement process for a company's operation.In this thesis, we focus on an air cargo operation center, a key node in the airfreight logistics network. We perform a complete capacity assessment for the international freight operation center to improve operation capacity and service level. The proposed method seems to be an effective way for the operation capacity analysis, which might be applicable to other companies in the logistics industry.We borrow some ideas of the capacity assessment in manufacturing industry. Through process analysis, operation resource assessment, industrial organization analysis, operation study, time study, fluctuation pattern study, capacity modeling and statistical data analysis, we assess the inbound process and outbound process of the air cargo operation center. Starting from the micro-operation processes, through analyzing the factors that might have impact on operation capacity, we assess the capacity of the critical processes one-by-one. And then, we use TOC theory to analyze the bottlenecks and calculate the capacity of the operation system. The analysis in the study is an integrated application of several operations management tools.