Container management in a single-vendor-multiple-buyer supply chain
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Container management in a single-vendor-multiple-buyer supply chain Christoph H. Glock • Taebok Kim
Received: 26 January 2013 / Accepted: 30 September 2013 Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
Abstract This paper studies a supply chain consisting of a single vendor and multiple retailers that uses returnable transport items, such as containers or crates, to facilitate shipping products from the vendor to the retailers. The paper considers two different strategies for transporting finished products from the supplier to the retailers: In case of early shipments, deliveries to a retailer can be made while the production process at the supplier is still in progress, while in the case of late shipments, the supplier has to wait until the entire production lot has been finished before shipments can be made from the lot. The paper develops mathematical models for both strategies and derives optimal solutions for the cycle time, the container size, the individual order quantities of the retailers and the shipment sequence with the intention to minimize the average total costs of the system. The behavior of the models is analyzed with the help of numerical examples. Keywords Returnable transport item Joint economic lot size RTI Container management Single-vendor-multiple-buyers
C. H. Glock Carlo and Karin Giersch Endowed Chair ‘‘Business Management: Industrial Management’’, Department of Law and Economics, Technische Universita¨t Darmstadt, Hochschulstr. 1, 64289 Darmstadt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] T. Kim (&) Graduate School of Logistics, Incheon National University, Songdo-Dong, Yeonsu-Gu, Incheon 406-840, Korea e-mail: [email protected]
1 Introduction Governmental regulations and changes in customer preferences have induced companies to reduce the environmental impact of their operations. Among the various areas which have been identified as drivers of sustainable supply chain management, the distribution of products has often been characterized as a key driver of sustainability [2, 39, 51]. In transforming traditional distribution systems into more environmentally friendly ones, the transportation equipment and the packaging materials used are of major importance. More than a decade ago, Hekkert et al. [23] hypothesized that using reusable instead of one-way packaging material has the potential to reduce global CO2 emissions from production and transportation by up to 16 %. Other studies suggested that employing reusable packaging material may reduce the gross energy requirement and waste generation of transportation significantly [39]. So-called returnable transport items (RTIs), which represent a specific type of reusable packaging material, such as pallets, crates, railcars or (maritime) containers, are used in a variety of industries today, e.g., in the automotive or consumer goods industries or the grocery sector [19, 29, 44, 46, 47]. It is clear that the use of reusable packaging material has to be adequately coordinated to fully realize the benefits this type of p
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