Analysis and improvement of the product delivery system of a beer producer in Ankara

Abstract

We outline our analysis of the product delivery system of a major beer producer in Ankara, Turkey. We demonstrate a savings potential of up to 25% of distribution costs from the implementation of a number of suggested improvements, most notably that of reducing the number of weekly deliveries to a portion of the customers, and of constructing a geographical partitioning of the city that ensures a balanced distribution of the delivery workload over the days of the week. A geographic information system (GIS) is used to extract coordinate and distance information to be used in the partitioning and sequencing problems. A discussion of the difficulties involved in implementing a GIS project in Turkey is included.

Keywords:

• distribution
• geographical information systems

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to Associate Professor Nurünnisa Usul, Chairperson of the Middle East Technical University Geodetic and Geographic Information Technologies Program for providing us with GIS instruction and basemaps, and to Damijan Gradis̆er for writing the interfaces that automated data exchanges between our spreadsheet program, LP solver, and GIS. We also express our gratitude to our client for close cooperation during all phases of the project. We thank an anonymous referee whose comments helped improve an earlier version of the paper.