Interplant Mile Reduction
The Project
The objective of my project was to reduce interplant miles. These were any shipments from one Anheuser-Busch owned facility to another. This project presented three significant challenges:
The approach- My project no specific way to reduce miles, therefore I needed to come up with my own plan.
The data- The historical shipments were not tracked in a way conducive to my analysis, so I learned a lot about our shipments to have the context necessary to manipulate the data​.
The analysis- I taught myself how to use Microsoft SAS as I needed it to analyze the quantity of historical data I had.
What is interplant?
When Anheuser-Busch ships its products, it'll either ship directly to the wholesaler or to a distribution center (DC) and then the wholesaler. When products are sent indirectly through a DC, it's considered an interplant shipment because the products are being transferred between different company owned facilities.
Finding the optimal distribution center (DC)
To cut down on interplant miles, I found the optimal DC for every lane we shipped. The optimal DC would be whichever DC was least out of the way for a truck going from brewery to the wholesaler.
Suggested changes
Due to limitations of our optimization software, we could only manually change a limited number of lanes. Therefore, I found the lanes that would offer the greatest bang for our buck. If the changes I suggested had been made, over 100,000 miles would have been saved in the two months I studied.
