Distributor Warehouse with Last Mile Delivery

5 Distributor Warehouse with Last Mile Delivery 

The last mile delivery to home or business requires the distributor to design a delivery tour of the delivery-vehicle, satisfying customers delivery-time requirements, as shown in Fig. 6.7. Vans start from the distributor s warehouse, make deliveries, and return to the warehouse. To facilitate scheduling customers are offered time slots to choose from, which are determined before customer-orders arrive. When delivery routes begin to fill up, the distributor may reduce the number of slots offered and/or change the fees associated with deliveries during each time slot. 

In setting up their last mile home-delivery operations for fresh food, Peapod determines the number of time slots to offer in a day, the length of time slots, and time slots that would be active in a zip code of a city (Agatz et al. 2007). Peapod uses characteristics such as population density, web penetration, and historical demand data to define service requirements for each zip code. Because dehvery trucks may visit several zip codes in the duration of a single time slot (based mi 

For a soft drink distributor using last mile delivery, inbound shipments of ingredients and consumables usually come on large trucks but the outbound shipments of finished products to numerous customers are organized using smaller vans. It leads to higher shipment costs for the outbound shipments. In global health care delivery last mile distribution is used to make medicines available at remote locations (USAID 2011), and must address local issues such as infrastructure. 

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Fig. 6.7 Distributor warehouse with last mile delivery...

Distributor storage with last-mile delivery requires higher levels of inventory than the other options (except for retail stores) because it has a lower level of aggregation. From an inventory perspective, warehouse storage with last-mile delivery is suitable for relatively fast-moving items that are needed qnickly and for which some level of aggregation is beneficial. Auto parts required by car dealers fit this description. 

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