Minimization of Transportation Cost in Dairy Industry

Abstract

A supply chain consists of organizations, people, resources and information involved in moving a product or service from supplier to customer. Risk and uncertainty have been found to be one of the indispensable parts of any manufacturing or food supply chain, No matter how strong is the supply chain, risk and uncertainty come into the picture by disrupting the operational flow. The situation further gets complicated, if the nature of the material the supply chain deals in, is perishable requiring conditioned transportation and storage. Transportation is the major function of a supply chain, which provides the movement of goods. Finding out efficient vehicle routes is an important problem. Hence transportation is a major issue in the food supply chain. In this work, the optimization of the transportation route for a public sector milk dairy in Madurai is carried out. In this firm, vehicles collect milk from various procurement points and finally reached the depot. When the firm can abbreviate the corresponding routing distance, then it will be able to provide better service and also the transportation costs can be reduced, as cost reduction is the important objective of every industry. This project also aims in a comparative study of the current transportation route used in this milk dairy and the optimized route suggested by this work considering the distance, cost, quantity, number of vehicles & road conditions.