DEVELOPMENT OF SPREADSHEET BASED DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR PRODUCT DISTRIBUTIONS

Product distribution is a complex process as it involves meeting requirements from several stake holders including
the distributors and customers. The primary objective of product distribution process is meeting the customers’
demand as well as minimizing the cost incurred by the distributor. For distributor that supports large number of
customers, the available commercial softwares for optimizing and scheduling of product distribution are typically
being used. However, these systems are complex, costly and require long processing time on a dedicated computer
system. Thus, these commercial softwares are not practical for distributors that support small number of customers
and as such the optimization and scheduling activities are usually done manually based on rule-of-thumb. This
process is time consuming and the results may not be optimal. This paper presents a decision support system
employing a two-step sequential approach for product deliveries. First is to determine the optimum carrier required
to meet customers demand utilizing linear programming with the objective function to minimize the total distribution
cost. Premium Solver Platform (PSP) is utilized to model the optimization problem. Second is to use multi-criteria
decision making approach applying various physical and logistic rules to generate the carrier assignment and
scheduling. Both approaches are developed using spreadsheet due to its ease of implementation and lowest cost of
ownership. The outcome indicates that this decision support system gives a better result compared to the manual
assignment of carrier while minimizing the distribution cost. Furthermore, the system requires only a few minutes to
generate the results and thus can be applied to practical usage. It is also shown that the system could be used as a
viable planning tool for strategic decision concerning investment on the number of carrier required to meet future
demand.