Publications & Videos

This thesis project provides practitioners with a new mathematical model to estimate an appropriate number of production planners required for the supply chain planning department of a company in the consumer packaged goods industry. Using bivariate correlation and multiple regression analyses, we explored whether a relationship exists between the required...

As the recession and global competition threaten profitability, firms are increasingly turning to their procurement function of the supply chain to achieve significant cost reductions and maintain a competitive edge. When procuring unique, highly-engineered components, the price is often negotiated with suppliers. Our project explored ways to estimate a procured...

Scheduling dispatchers in the Rail industry is difficult because of training requirements, unplanned employee absences, and the nature of shift work. This project uses past data on absences to build a model to predict unplanned absences. It also uses Monte Carlo simulation to evaluate the tradeoffs among extra staff, the...

By conducting semi-structured interviews and developing a value chain map, we identified and quantified the business costs of each actor in the distribution chain of pharmaceuticals in Zambia and Zimbabwe. We then estimated how these costs translate into the mark-ups of two essential medicines, M1 and O1. These calculations are...

This project explored what factors affect tender rejection, a frequent and consistent problem in the truckload (TL) transportation industry. We examined geographical pattern, length of haul, and variability of volume as the key factor. We used ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis to quantify the effect of those factors. Author...