Order-to-delivery cycle

Velocity. Changes in supply chain cycles for lead times, order-to-delivery cycles, inventory turns, time-to-market for products. 

However, it is not just time-to-market that is important. Once a product is on the market the abiiity to respond quickiy to demand is equally Important. Here the lead time to re-supply a market determines the organisation s ability to exploit demand during the life cycle. It is apparent that those companies that can achieve reductions in the order-to-delivery cycle will have a strong advantage over their slower competitors. 

Del Monte Foods, a large US foods company, has successfully transformed its supply chain (Godfrey et al. 2012). The company created network-wide transparency into demand signals and inventories to implement pull-oriented supply processes. Del Monte s has benefited greatly from service level enhancements, and its order-to-ship lead times dropped by as much as 24 hours for many customers. It enabled a 60-hour order-to-delivery cycle time, which enabled the company to help retailers reduce safety stocks. 

Key performance indicators (KPIs) It includes measurement of performance such as asset utihzation, customer satisfaction, cycle time from order to delivery, inventory turnover, operations costs, productivity and financial results (return on assets and return on investment). 

In a sense, the information we receive, if we only have the order to rely on, is like the tip of an iceberg. Only a small proportion of the total iceberg is visible above the surface. Likewise the order cycle time (i.e. the required response time from order to delivery) may only be the visible tip of the information iceberg (see Figure 4.5). 

We have already made the point that in today s volatile business environment it is much harder to achieve high levels of forecast accuracy for individual items. Whilst managers will always be seeking better forecasts, the fact is that as uncertainty increases it gets harder to run a business on the basis of forecast demand at the stock keeping unit (SKU) level. Instead the focus has to be on how the company can move from a forecast-driven to a demand-driven mentality. Basically what this means is that ways have to be found to make it possible to react to demand within the customer s order cycle. Thus if the customer s expectation is for a five-day lead time from order to delivery, the goal is to be able to respond within that lead time. 

Another survey - this time of over 300 organisations in the United States -probed integration between marketing and logistics functions within a focal firm (Stank et ah, 1999). More frequent integrative behaviour between marketing and logistics resulted in better performance and better interdepartmental effectiveness. This may seem obvious, but the improvements in performance included cycle time reduction, better in-stock performance, increased product availability levels, and improvements in order-to-delivery lead times. 

Research has shown that improved coordination between marketing and logistics results in better performance in areas such as cycle times, inventories, product availability, and order-to-delivery lead times. Internal integration is the essential precursor to external integration. 

Fluoro amino acids have been incorporated into peptides, in order to ease the transport or reduce the systemic toxicity. Thus, trifluoroalanine, a powerful inhibitor of alanine racemase, is an essential enzyme for the biosynthesis of the cell wall of bacteria. It has a low antibiotic activity because of its very poor transport. In order to facilitate this transport, the amino acid has been incorporated into a peptide. This delivery allows a reduction of the doses, and thus the toxicity of the treatment is lowered.3-FIuorophenylaIanine (3-F-Phe) is a substrate of phenylalanine hydroxylase, which transforms it into 3-F-Tyr. 3-F-Tyr has a high toxicity for animals, due to its ultimate metabolization into fluorocitrate, a powerful inhibitor of the Krebs cycle (cf. Chapter 7). 3-F-Phe has a low toxicicity toward fungus cells, but when delivered as a tripeptide 3-F-Phe becomes an efficient inhibitor of the growth of Candida albicans. This tripeptide goes into the cell by means of the active transport system of peptides, where the peptidases set free the 3-F-Phe. ... 

Lead time is also affected by order cycle time, which includes the time it takes to transmit the order to the supplier, process the order, assemble the material, and transport them to the customer (1). Time between order and delivery may be affected by a number of factors. 

The industrial engineer can apply a variety of mathematical and engineering tools and techniques in the planning and management of effective transportation networks and systems in order to reduce or minimize costs, improve cycle time, reduce service failures, and so on. The industrial engineer plays a critical role in the development of efficient delivery routes, schedules, and plans and also helps in the design and implementation of transportation information systems. 

As part of the discussion on the use of textile construction membranes, it should be made clear what happens at end-of-Ufe for materials used so far for building construction. Thermoplastic membrane components like PVC can be processed after each utilization period under certain conditions and be supplied for reuse in the raw material cycle. Leading European manufacturers of PVC/PES membranes and roofing sheets have united in order to recycle post-consumer waste, disused membranes and PVC materials (ref. Vinyl) in most modem plants with approved thermo-physical procedures. The output of this recycling process is then used for new products. An important factor in the operation of these and other environmental raw-material recovery procedures is logistics, which includes the materials being carefully prepared and sorted prior to delivery. The processing plants are potentially able to achieve a turnover of more than one ton per hour (ref. recovinyl). 

The performance specification and the acceptable cost of a battery depend, of course, on its application. Here we are concerned with traction batteries, primarily for use in road vehicles, and we have concentrated our attention upon urban buses and light delivery vehicles. In order to define the battery performance targets it is first necessary to consider the operational problem from the point of view of the traffic manager, who specifies the journey profile which the vehicle must be capable of making, and then to select a particular design of vehicle in order to interpret this duty cycle in terms of energy and power requirements and the permissible mass and volume of the battery. When this was done, we arrived at a specification of battery performance for each class of vehicle (Table l). 

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