Module 4

Transport, Distribution and Sustainable Logistics

What can you expect?

Transport is a component of Supply Chain management which must globally respond to changing service objectives, as well as adapt to external and contextual factors such as energy prices and infrastructure congestion. A good balance between cost and service performance requires optimizing transport management on several dimensions:

Optimizing transport also means to align the decisions with the overall strategy of the firm. In the area of transport more than in any other, questions of flexibility, fleet variety - in response to demand variability- and ultimately outsourcing to 2PL or 3PL service providers need to be examined.

The design and the management of the physical distribution system is a key ingredient to customer service performance. Questions arising in this module relate to multiple distribution steps, late customization of conditioning and delivery, and cost of transport versus cost of stocks and storage.

Reverse logistics issues will also be examined in this module. Such issues arise,in particular, due to the emergence of new environmental legislations, such as the WEE directive. At the operational level, the efficiency of the global Supply Chain is also heavily impacted by various reverse processes induced by returned products (trial, defective, reusable products, empty containers, etc.). The necessity to identify and to manage the resulting closed-loop Supply Chains as a business process in its own right will be stressed in this module.

The learning objectives of this module are to help the participants:

Prof. Yves Crama
Envisaged case study and visit: "PFS Web"
Location: tbc
Date: May 13-25, 2013