Woven Metal Products, Inc. (WMP) is a global supplier of fabricated products. The customer base expands across US, Canada, Mexico (North America) and rest of the world (Europe/Asia). The company however faces repeated issues in terms of on-time shipment pick up and deliveries are often delayed. On the other hand, appropriate product packaging during shipment is difficult to ensure due to various customs regulations. As a group, we analyzed the problem given and tried to develop a set of qualitative solution for the client. WMP currently deals with multiple forwarding agencies. Given the relatively small business volume, we felt consolidation of vendor portfolio is a good option. Also, WMP provides a wide-number of inco-term for its customers, which largely increases the delivery and quality liability for the supplier. Based on the previous year delivery revenue/inco-term data, a suitable choice of delivery inco-term can largely reduce the risk portfolio.

Our team of 4 was given the responsibility to look into the existing rake transportation network of Hindalco, from the alumina smelter to the factories. The deliverable included designing a rake prioritization and scheduling algorithm and simulating the dispatch schedule, according to the monthly requirement.

As an academic project under logistics and supply chain management, our team looked into the existing supply chain network for Mondelez - which included the factory, warehouse and demand centres. Compared to the previous scenario, the GST rule is set to bring stock transfer under its purview, as well as impose an additional 1% tax as origin based tax. Taking these costs into consideration, our team is working to restructure the warehouse positions, designing warehouse capacity and preparing a transportation model, which will help to minimize the total cost of the supply chain network.

As a project deliverable, we studied in detail the different aspects of the mainstream tracking technologies - Bar Code Scanning, GPS, RFID etc. and how they can be integrated with the logistics and transportation vendors, working with Dow Chemicals presently. The project involved extensive primary research where we spoke with key vendors to understand their insights and developed a cost-benefit analysis to portray the potential benefit of using GPS as a tracking tool. The project was well-appreciated by the Project Team at Dow Chemicals, Mumbai.