Assignment title: Information
1
Supply Chain Forecasting and Decision Analysis 2015-16 Coursework
Administration and Submission Requirements
This coursework is worth 25% of the total module mark. It needs to be done in
self-selected groups of up to 3 as registered on Moodle. Please submit your
report to Moodle as a single report.
Marks are deducted for late submission according to standard Cass Masters
regulations.
Submission is required by Thursday 24 March 2016 by 5:00pm.
Each submission made should be entirely independent of any other
submission.
There are severe penalties for plagiarism.
Use Harvard System for referencing, if appropriate.
Requirement:
Solve both cases. Conduct some meaningful what-if experiments in each
case to investigate the robustness of your solution. Write a report for
management explaining the findings from your spreadsheets (maximum 5
sides). The report should be followed by a Technical Appendix where you
explain, to a technically-educated audience, what analysis you have done,
why it is the appropriate choice and what assumptions you have made in
applying the analyses to the respective cases.
Grading criteria will be the same for each case and based upon:
Correct model choice and implementation
Managerial interpretation of results
Discussion of assumptions underlying analysis
Appropriate presentation
Case 1: Delivery System Design at Bullseye Department Store (50%)
Bullseye Department store is a discount retailer of general mechandise. The
company owns 50 stores, but they are supplied from a single warehouse.
Most of the mechandise received at the warehouse arrives in trucks.
Trucks arrive at the warehouse at random with a rate of once every seven
minutes on average. Eight loading docks are available at the warehouse. A
2
single worker mans each dock and is able to unload a truck in approximately
30 minutes on average. When all the docks are occupied, arriving trucks wait
in a queue until one becomes available.
Bullseye has received complaints from some of the trucking firms that
deliveries are taking too long at the warehouse. In response, Bullseye is
considering a number of options to try to reduce the time trucks must spend at
the warehouse. One option is to hire an extra worker for each of the loading
docks. This is expected to reduce the average time it takes to unload a truck
to eighteen minutes. It costs approximately £17 per hour in salary and fringe
benefits to employ each additional worker.
Alternatively, the company can continue to use a single worker at each
loading dock but upgrade the forklift equipment workers use to unload trucks.
The company can replace the existing forklift equipment with a new model
that can be leased for £6 per hour and is expected to reduce the average time
required to unload a truck to 23 minutes.
Finally, the company can build two new loading docks for a capitalized cost of
£6 per hour and hire two additional workers at a rate of £17 per hour to man
these locations. Bullseye estimates its costs of £60 in goodwill for each hour
a truck spends at the warehouse.
Which, if any, of the three alternatives Bullseye should implement?
Build a Simul8 model of the Bullseye situation and use it to verify the results
you obtained above. Experiment with potential configurations that would be
difficult to replicate with analytical queueing models.
Case 2: DHL Supply Chain Case (50%)
Case to be provided.
Be sure to include in an appropriate place in your report:
(1) The mathematical formulation of the problem
(2) An excel file implementing the formulation