Approach of just-in-time distribution requirements planning for supply chain management

The distribution of finished goods to customers plays an important role in supply chain management. This paper introduces an approach that takes care of multi-warehouse and multi-retailer scenarios. In order to pull material through a supply chain effectively, we proposed a just-in-time distribution requirements planning system under the limited supply capacity. The aim is to establish an optimal distribution requirements planning model to minimize the total cost of manufacturing and transportation as well as the earliness/tardiness penalty in meeting retailer's requirements under limited warehouse capacity. Using mathematical deduction, the model can be translated into a linear programming problem and solved by a simplex procedure. The computational results have shown that the proposed approach can offer more effective distribution requirements plans. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.