Implementing agility in the logistics flows to achieve competitiveness in a turbulent external environment

This thesis discusses how companies are now required to review their supply chains in order to be competitive in today's marketplace. Indeed, sudden external events that disrupt the smooth operation of corporate supply chains have been found to be increasingly common, leading the concept of agility, the ability to respond promptly to unexpected circumstances, to be incrementally popular. Agility translates into the concepts of process integrations, market sensitivity, virtual supply chain and network. In fact, today's challenges of companies no longer focus only on achieving a lean supply chain, through cost efficiency and the elimination of all unproductive processes, but also on the concepts of durability, robustness and scalability of all operations involved. What is said here above will be analysed through a project consisting in the optimization of the logistics network in the USA of a French company operating in the food sector following the acquisition of one of its main 3PL distributors. The project starts with the modelling of the current network by collecting the data of all flows during 2021 of the two entities, the French company and the acquired distributor. Once these have been cleaned, reordered and restructured, the flows going to the same customers were assembled, as the two entities merged following the acquisition. In order to get a complete view of the as-is situation which can then be compared with future scenarios, it is interesting to take into account parameters such as transportation and warehouse costs as well as the lead time of orders shipment to the final customers. However, companies’ databases are often incomplete and disorganised, which is why it was necessary to estimate functions that could represent such parameters. Once obtained a final vision of the as-is, the modelling of future scenarios was conducted. As a first step, insights of the U.S. market impacting the company's logistics activities were analysed. Given these findings, possible alternative locations for current warehouses were then defined to restructure the logistic network. Next, a three-step approach was followed for the modelling of future scenarios. Beginning with the integration of sales forecasts up to 2027, the criteria for dividing the flows of purchased and manufactured products according to distribution centres’ locations were defined, concluding with the modelling of scenarios in terms of costs and lead time. The model created is simple, intuitive and dynamic. Nowadays, in fact, it is necessary to have in hand tools that even if they do not bring the highest precision in results, are able to provide an immediate global vision that can best guide business decision-making correspondingly to the continuous changes of external parameters.