Efficient logistics control demands for transparency to inventory in the whole distribution network. However, current information technology (IT) solutions do not support creating inventory transparency to temporary storage locations, which poses severe problems for supply chain management in project-oriented industries. This paper presents how inventory transparency can be built with quick-to-...

Prolonged anoxia has deleterious effects on islets. Gas-permeable cell culture devices can be used to minimize anoxia during islet culture and especially during shipment when elimination of gas-liquid interfaces is required to prevent the formation of damaging gas bubbles. Gas-permeable bags may have several drawbacks, such as propensity for puncture and contamination, difficult islet retrieval...

Hubs, or central trans-shipment facilities, allow the construction of a network where large numbers of direct connections can be replaced with fewer, indirect connections. Hub-andspoke configurations reduce and simplify network construction costs, centralize commodity handling and sorting, and allow carriers to take advantage of scale economies through consolidation of flows. Such networks have...

Transportation of blood samples is unavoidable for assessment of specific parameters in blood of patients with rare anemias, blood doping testing, or for research purposes. Despite the awareness that shipment may substantially alter multiple parameters, no study of that extent has been performed to assess these changes and optimize shipment conditions to reduce transportation-related artifacts....

This paper develops a more general production-inventory model for a single-vendor–single-buyer integrated system. Unlike the hitherto existing production-inventory models for the vendor–buyer system, the present model neither requires the buyer’s unit holding cost greater than the vendor’s nor assumes the structure of shipment policy. Secondly, the model is extended to the situation with shorta...

287 Numerous organizations are involved in distributing goods and materials. When shipping alternatives exist, the selection of the appropriate shipping alternative (mode) for each shipment may result in significant cost savings. This paper describes a highly flexible dispatching system that selects the shipping mode to be used for each shipment while minimizing the overall shipping costs. Mult...

Supply chains (SC) span many geographies, modes and industries and involve several phases where data flows in both directions from suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, to customers. This data flow is necessary to support critical business decisions that may impact product cost and market share. Current SC information systems are unable to provide validated, pseudo real-time shipme...

We developed a two-phase network planning methodology to design a service network for DHL(HK) based on two measures of service performance: service coverage and service reliability. The methodology consists of first using an optimization model to determine a least-cost distribution network, which forms the basis of a simulation model for analyzing the network's operational characteristics. It t...