Creating an offer for tendered logistical services of potential or existing costumers is a regularly occurring process. In most of the cases do short tender deadlines encounter the many different design options in the field of order picking. No structured and standardized decision support or modularly constructed system exist, which supports the creation of tender documents. As a result of that, tender documents are not comparable, but still bear the mark of the individual employee. The problem lays in the fact, that maybe not one of the best solutions under consideration of customer requirements is chosen.
A potential solution, which is pursued in this research project, is the usage of simulation software, to systematically consider the effects of the numerous solution options under uncertain conditions (e.g. fluctuations in the level of demand, temporal distribution of demand) on the logistic costs and performance in one of the first planning phases of the tender. As a basis, the underlying processes and associated benchmarks have to be identified, analysed and visualized. Requests for Quotation are part of this step, as well. The subsequent process calculation (e.g. with accounting of process cost and contribution margin) serves to identify the respectively advantageous variation of order picking.
The project is supposed to initially reappraise this topic for a chosen part of order picking and show exemplary how such decision support can be conceptually designed and purposefully used, with the support of simulation software. Thereby, potential requirements for the usage of the simulation software support will be collected. Also, relevant parameter configurations will be described exemplarily in the form of “Use Cases” as application scenarios of the simulation software in the tender process.
Key Data:
Runtime: September till November 2017
Partner:
- Deutsch Bahn AG;
- Schenker Deutschland AG;
- Fachgebiet Multimodalität und Logistiktechnologien,
- Technische Universität Darmstadt