Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

5-2007

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

M. Eng.

Department

Industrial Engineering

Committee Chair

Evans, Gerald W.

Subject

Electric power production--Data processing; Electric power distribution--Data processing

Abstract

The purpose of this project was to analyze the ordering policies for a distribution system. The company has one central distribution center and nineteen branch warehouses spread throughout the country. Each branch warehouse can order product lines either through the local Distribution Center or directly from the vendor. The problem is that the current order policies are ineffective, and it was hypothesized that changes to these policies could result in a significant improvement over the current operations. Therefore, the distribution system was analyzed using an Arena computer simulation model that was developed previously. This project focused on comparing the current ordering policies for the product lines to the optimal policies as determined by the simulation model. Before the simulation runs could be completed, eleven input files needed to be created for each vendor. This process was completed using Visual Basic macros to ease future input file generation. These macros search and compute data from the spreadsheets provided by the company. The results of the analysis show that in general, the company should order more products through the vendor than they currently plan. Changing the ordering policies for all 25 of the studied vendors could potentially yield a profit increase of $629,500 over a nine month steady-state period.

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