Optimising the Transshipment Problem of Blue Sky Limited

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2013-12-09
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Abstract
Transshipment, when possible, can be used as one effective way to reduce total inventory and increase service level in a distribution system. Essentially, transshipment allows the distribution system to take advantage of the risk pooling effect to deal with uncertain demands at different retail locations. Excess inventory at one retail location can be used to cover shortage at another location. Physically, one can interpret inventory stocking at each individual location as being “pooled” together to meet the demands at any other location within the distribution system. As such, the use of transhipment provides more flexibility in deploying the available inventory in the system to meet uncertain customer demand. From a management and operation perspective, a fundamental question in this problem is whether the company should move the product into the demand ports directly from the supply port, or whether the transhipment operation using an established warehouse can help to reduce the total cost to the company and increase responsiveness. From the resource utilization perspective, a transhipment system is certainly preferred as it provides a better utilization of the transporting goods. Currently, as at the time of this work, there is no such method for determining which route to be used in transporting the products by the company. The routes are chosen using guess work and by the discretion of the people in charge. For the data used for our analysis, the company using their crude approach arrived at the following conclusion; shipped the loads of 15000, 5000, 10000, 8000, 2000 and 10000 at a unit costs of GH¢15, GH¢7, GH¢10, GH¢4, GH¢3 and GH¢2 through the routes X - W2 – B, X - W2 – C, Y - W1 – A, Y – W1- B, Y - W2 – D, and Z – W2. Total cost of transporting these products was four hundred and eighteen thousand Ghana cedis (GH¢418,000.00).
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A thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the award of Master of Science degree in Industrial Mathematics,June-2013
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