Optimization Of Transportation Costs In Supply Chain Management (A Case Study Of Coca-Cola Plants In Nigeria)

ABSTRACT

In the manufacturing sector management of the supply chain expenses has been identified as major costs driven problem. For many years, researchers and practitioners have concentrated on the individual processes and entities within the Supply Chain. Recently, however, many companies have realized that important cost savings can be achieved through the reduction of transportation costs throughout their Supply Chain. As companies began realizing the benefits of optimizing transportation costs in their Supply Chain as a single entity, researchers began utilizing operations research techniques to better the model. In this thesis, optimization model using linear programming technique was developed to solve the transportation costs problem of Coca-Cola Company with respect to the operations of its plant at Aba, Owerri, Port Harcourt, and Enugu, and its depots in Mbaise, Orlu, Umuahia, Calabar and Uyo. Also considered were the truckload movements between the cities. The transportation costs problem was solved to obtain the plants-todepots optimal truckload schedules using cost minimization as the objective function. Extensive surveys were carried out and data obtained were analyzed using a software package- TORA. The minimizing cost was obtained as N3,946million, which was found to be significant compared with the original cost of N21,412million. The problem was also subjected to sensitivity analysis and an efficient improvement on the model was achieved. The results showed that 39.20% of the company total expenditure in the transportation sector for six years was on maintenance, while 20.50%, 8.79% and 5.05% were on Fuel, drivers welfare and loading/offloading respectively.