Odisha Craft – crafting the right expansion strategy

2022 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Soumyajyoti Datta

Learning outcomes Familiarize with the retail operations of handicrafts, facility location problem, apply multi-criteria decision through the goal programming approach and solving the same with MS Excel. Case overview / synopsis The case portrays a dilemma in the context of retail operations of a small-scale handicraft company known as Odisha Craft. Located in Odisha, Susanta Mohanty, the owner, was finding it a challenge to decide on the most promising location for his new retail outlet in the neighbouring city of Kolkata. He had five choices for the locations. Odisha craft was established by his father-in-law in 2009 with an objective to preserve and promote the rich culture of the handicrafts designed by the local artisans and ensure sustainable rural livelihood. The company had been facing numerous challenges and the pandemic has given a very formidable blow to the monthly revenues. The case brings out the multi-faceted dilemma of deciding on the facility location in 2020, involving a set of conflicting criteria. The case unfolds a systematic solution approach resolving the dilemma using MS Excel. Complexity academic level Courses such as operations research, operations management, service operations and retail operations for MBA students and trainings for junior-middle level executives. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available for educators only. Subject code CSS 09: Operations and Logistics

2020 ◽  
Vol 120 (3) ◽  
pp. 526-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hong Ma ◽  
Ni Shen ◽  
Jing Zhu ◽  
Mingrong Deng

Purpose Motivated by a problem in the context of DiDi Travel, the biggest taxi hailing platform in China, the purpose of this paper is to propose a novel facility location problem, specifically, the single source capacitated facility location problem with regional demand and time constraints, to help improve overall transportation efficiency and cost. Design/methodology/approach This study develops a mathematical programming model, considering regional demand and time constraints. A novel two-stage neighborhood search heuristic algorithm is proposed and applied to solve instances based on data sets published by DiDi Travel. Findings The results of this study show that the model is adequate since new characteristics of demand can be deduced from large vehicle trajectory data sets. The proposed algorithm is effective and efficient on small and medium as well as large instances. The research also solves and presents a real instance in the urban area of Chengdu, China, with up to 30 facilities and demand deduced from 16m taxi trajectory data records covering around 16,000 drivers. Research limitations/implications This study examines an offline and single-period case of the problem. It does not consider multi-period or online cases with uncertainties, where decision makers need to dynamically remove out-of-service stations and add other stations to the selected group. Originality/value Prior studies have been quite limited. They have not yet considered demand in the form of vehicle trajectory data in facility location problems. This study takes into account new characteristics of demand, regional and time constrained, and proposes a new variant and its solution approach.


2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (9) ◽  
pp. 884-902 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abhijeet Ghadge ◽  
Qifan Yang ◽  
Nigel Caldwell ◽  
Christian König ◽  
Manoj Kumar Tiwari

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to find a sustainable facility location solution for a closed-loop distribution network in the uncertain environment created by of high levels of product returns from online retailing coupled with growing pressure to reduce carbon emissions. Design/methodology/approach A case study approach attempts to optimize the distribution centre (DC) location decision for single and double hub scenarios. A hybrid approach combining centre of gravity and mixed integer programming is established for the un-capacitated multiple allocation facility location problem. Empirical data from a major national UK retail distributor network is used to validate the model. Findings The paper develops a contemporary model that can take into account multiple factors (e.g. operational and transportation costs and supply chain (SC) risks) while improving performance on environmental sustainability. Practical implications Based on varying product return rates, SC managers can decide whether to choose a single or a double hub solution to meet their needs. The study recommends a two hub facility location approach to mitigate emergent SC risks and disruptions. Originality/value A two-stage hybrid approach outlines a unique technique to generate candidate locations under twenty-first century conditions for new DCs.


Author(s):  
Issam Moussaoui ◽  
Brent D. Williams ◽  
Christian Hofer ◽  
John A. Aloysius ◽  
Matthew A. Waller

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to: first, provide a systematic review of the drivers of retail on-shelf availability (OSA) that have been scrutinized in the literature; second, identify areas where further scrutiny is needed; and third, critically reflect on current conceptualizations of OSA and suggest alternative perspectives that may help guide future investigations. Design/methodology/approach – A systematic approach is adopted wherein nine leading journals in logistics, supply chain management, operations management, and retailing are systematically scanned for articles discussing OSA drivers. The respective journals’ websites are used as the primary platform for scanning, with Google Scholar serving as a secondary platform for completeness. Journal articles are carefully read and their respective relevance assessed. A final set of 73 articles is retained and thoroughly reviewed for the purpose of this research. The systematic nature of the review minimizes researcher bias, ensures reasonable completeness, maximizes reliability, and enables replicability. Findings – Five categories of drivers of OSA are identified. The first four – i.e., operational, behavioral, managerial, and coordination drivers – stem from failures at the planning or execution stages of retail operations. The fifth category – systemic drivers – encompasses contingency factors that amplify the effect of supply chain failures on OSA. The review also indicates that most non-systemic OOS could be traced back to incentive misalignments within and across supply chain partners. Originality/value – This research consolidates past findings on the drivers of OSA and provides valuable insights as to areas where further research may be needed. It also offers forward-looking perspectives that could help advance research on the drivers of OSA. For example, the authors invite the research community to revisit the pervasive underlying assumption that OSA is an absolute imperative and question the unidirectional relationship that higher OSA is necessarily better. The authors initiate an open dialogue to approach OSA as a service-level parameter, rather than a maximizable outcome, as indicated by inventory theory.


2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rui Liu ◽  
Shan Liu ◽  
Yu-Rong Zeng ◽  
Lin Wang

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate a new and practical decision support model of the coordinated replenishment and delivery (CRD) problem with multi-warehouse (M-CRD) to improve the performance of a supply chain. Two algorithms, tabu search-RAND (TS-RAND) and adaptive hybrid different evolution (AHDE) algorithm, are developed and compared as to the performance of each in solving the M-CRD problem. Design/methodology/approach The proposed M-CRD is more complex and practical than classical CRDs, which are non-deterministic polynomial-time hard problems. According to the structure of the M-CRD, a hybrid algorithm, TS-RAND, and AHDE are designed to solve the M-CRD. Findings Results of M-CRDs with different scales show that TS-RAND and AHDE are good candidates for handling small-scale M-CRD. TS-RAND can also find satisfactory solutions for large-scale M-CRDs. The total cost (TC) of M-CRD is apparently lower than that of a CRD with a single warehouse. Moreover, the TC is lower for the M-CRD with a larger number of optional warehouses. Practical implications The proposed M-CRD is helpful for managers to select the suitable warehouse and to decide the delivery scheduling with a coordinated replenishment policy under complex operations management situations. TS-RAND can be easily used by practitioners because of its robustness, easy implementation, and quick convergence. Originality/value Compared with the traditional CRDs with one warehouse, a better policy with lower TC can be obtained by the new M-CRD. Moreover, the proposed TS-RAND is a good candidate for solving the M-CRD.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (8) ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Vikrant Apoorva Kulkarni ◽  
Komal Chopra ◽  
Krishnakant Roy ◽  
Raji Vamadevan ◽  
Sajeesh Hamsa

Subject area Operations management. Study level/applicability Management post graduate and corporate executives. Case overview ProdVal Flow Controls Pvt Ltd was company in the SME sector in India. The company focused on quality products and timely delivery. The major challenge for ProdVal was increasing their production capacity. They had no control over their existing suppliers resulting in delay in raw materials delivery. Retention of vendors had an effect on inventory carrying cost. The company had limited production facilities and the workers were outsourced. The company operated with unskilled workers. The case presents the various issues faced by the company based on which strategies to practice and plan the company's future plans could be designed. This is a disguised case and all excerpts from interviews have been anonymized. Expected learning outcomes This case study will give an insight to students to understand how inventory management; impacts production. It even gives an idea about how ProdVal has used the strategy of outsourcing of technology and labour and maintained a good growth rate. Social implications - Production-related outsourcing. Production management in small scale industry. Organization structure of a manufacturing unit. Concept of outsourcing HR and technology in an SME. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available, please consult your librarian to access.


Author(s):  
Wenjun Ni ◽  
Jia Shu ◽  
Miao Song ◽  
Dachuan Xu ◽  
Kaike Zhang

Most existing facility location models assume that the facility cost is either a fixed setup cost or made up of a fixed setup and a problem-specific concave or submodular cost term. This structural property plays a critical role in developing fast branch-and-price, Lagrangian relaxation, constant ratio approximation, and conic integer programming reformulation approaches for these NP-hard problems. Many practical considerations and complicating factors, however, can make the facility cost no longer concave or submodular. By removing this restrictive assumption, we study a new location model that considers general nonlinear costs to operate facilities in the facility location framework. The general model does not even admit any approximation algorithms unless P = NP because it takes the unsplittable hard-capacitated metric facility location problem as a special case. We first reformulate this general model as a set-partitioning model and then propose a branch-and-price approach. Although the corresponding pricing problem is NP-hard, we effectively analyze its structural properties and design an algorithm to solve it efficiently. The numerical results obtained from two implementation examples of the general model demonstrate the effectiveness of the solution approach, reveal the managerial implications, and validate the importance to study the general framework.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ehsan Rashidzadeh ◽  
Seyyed Mohammad Hadji Molana ◽  
Roya Soltani ◽  
Ashkan Hafezalkotob

Purpose Delivery management of perishable products such as blood in a supply chain is a considerable issue such that the last-mile delivery, which refers to deliver goods to the end user as fast as possible takes into account as one of the most important, expensive and, polluting segments in the entire supply chain. Regardless of economic challenges, the last-mile delivery faces social and environmental barriers to continuing operations while complying with environmental and social standards, therefore incorporating sustainability into last-mile logistic strategy is no longer an option but rather a necessity. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to consider a last-mile delivery in a blood supply chain in terms of using appropriate technologies such as drones to assess sustainability. Design/methodology/approach The authors discuss the impact of drone technology on last-mile delivery and its importance in achieving sustainability. They focus on the effect of using drones on CO2 emission, costs and social benefits by proposing a multi-objective mathematical model to assess sustainability in the last-mile delivery. A preemptive fuzzy goal programming approach to solve the model and measure the achievement degree of sustainability is conducted by using a numerical example to show the capability and usefulness of the suggested model, solution approach and, impact of drone technology in achieving all three aspects of sustainability. Findings The findings illustrate the achievement degree of sustainability in the delivery of blood based on locating distribution centers and allocating drones. Moreover, a comparison between drones and conventional vehicles is carried out to show the preference of using drones in reaching sustainability. A sensitivity analysis on aspects of sustainability and specifications of drone technology is conducted for validating the obtained results and distinguishing the most dominant aspect and parameters in enhancing the achievement degree of sustainability. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no research has considered the assessment of sustainability in the last-mile delivery of blood supply chain with a focus on drone technology.


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