| Nowadays, global optimization of the supply chain is a major issue for companies of international scale. After spending the last decades optimizing their manufacturing operations, these companies realized that they needed to extend lean manufacturing principles outside their plants, downstream the supply chain. This is why just-in-time (JIT) supply was so quickly adopted by OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers). Actually, this supply technique forces inventory reduction and enables to answer the plants needs for flexibility and diversity, because required components only can be received at the right time. However, for spread supply chains, JIT supply represents a great challenge because of transit times. When suppliers and plants are spread on a wide area, the main objective is to synchronize the supply chain to be able to accelerate material flow throughout the chain without increasing transportation costs.; This research project tackles global optimization of logistic operations in a spread supply chain. More precisely, two major objectives were achieved, i.e. integrating transportation and inventory control operations in an optimization model aiming at minimizing total logistic costs, and developing a decision support system (DSS) to study the behavior of spread supply chains.; To conclude, even though the DSS developed in this research project allows modeling logistic operations of complex supply chains, it is not appropriate to manage and optimize a real supply chain on a daily basis. Actually, more powerful tools should be used. For example, to link suppliers, carriers and plants, a web based database would be necessary. Moreover, many 3PLs developed specialized mathematical algorithms to solve transportation problems. In short, a more powerful DSS could be used to test larger problems and to confirm the results obtained in this paper. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
