A Model-Based Decision Support to Manage Outbound Logistics

The logistics involved as a part of Supply Chain Management (SCM) demand the development of appropriate models to support decision making. In real life large business environment, the situation demands handling large-scale data and rapid development of models to process the same. These data may emerge from online transaction systems and the same need to be prepared or consolidated to input to the optimization models. The widespread implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems provides ample opportunity to access transactional databases for the integration of supply chain activities (Jeremy, 2008). In this paper, a prototype was developed to implement a decision support system for outbound logistics by a large cement manufacturing organization with multiple plants and distribution channels. While the dataflow from the transaction system to the optimization model was developed smoothly and transparently, the output of the model is integrated to the decision support system to manage outbound logistics. The approach adopted to integrate the transaction processing application with the decision support system is aimed at strengthening the existing scalable Supply Chain Infrastructure (SCI)