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Frontiers of Engineering Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering from the 2013 Symposium (2014) / Chapter Skim
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The Rise of Computer-Enabled Supply Chain Design--Steve Ellet
Pages 55-60

The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
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From page 55...
... Decisions about where to manufacture and stock products, which transportation modes to use, and what service levels to provide can either give a company a competitive advantage or leave it vulnerable to competitors and service disruptions. Today's supply chain designers increasingly use large-scale ­ athematical m programming models (with the help of optimization- and simulation-based software tools)
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From page 56...
... But even then, MIP requires large amounts of memory and time, often more than can be accommodated with current hardware in a business-reasonable amount of time. Recent Advances in Supply Chain Design Over the past decade improvements in processor performance and the correlated drop in cost as described by Moore's Law (see Figure 1)
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From page 57...
... Services like Amazon Cloud also enable users to push the limits of high-end hardware with a fraction of the hardware investment. Big Data Systems Big data systems make it possible to access and manipulate the large datasets that underlie supply chain design models.
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From page 58...
... data warehouses, which provide easy access to these data, has increased the use of historical data for analytical purposes, in turn increasing the focus on data accuracy. In addition to historical data, supply chain design models require what is called design data, information about options that did not exist in the historical network, such as candidate transportation lanes and potential facilities.
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From page 59...
... These advances have pushed the boundaries of supply chain design beyond network optimization into far more complex and valuable analyses of specific manufacturing lines, near-shoring or reshoring (i.e., whether to move production closer to the point of consumption) , seasonal production plans, omnichannel distribution, the building of seasonal inventory, global tax strategies, item-specific flow path design, and the consideration of greenhouse gas emissions and other sustainability factors.
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From page 60...
... 60 FIGURE 2  Screen image of a modern supply chain design software depicting a global distribution network. Source: LLamasoft.
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Key Terms

  • chain design
  • design models
  • integer programming
  • mixed integer
  • big data

  • design data
  • linear programming
  • recent advances
  • sophisticated modeling
  • transportation lanes

  • specific manufacturing
  • usability improvements
  • reduce cost
  • network optimization
  • using sophisticated

  • soon thereafter
  • inexperienced users
  • dramatic increase
  • formulate strategies
  • detailed supply

  • programming led
  • network configurations
  • modeling tools
  • easy access
  • design sift

  • industrial engineering
  • minimal cost
  • sensitivity analysis
  • chain designers
  • global optimum


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