Abstract (eng)
Due to rapidly changing organizational environments, company-intern processes and managerial decisions should be frequently re-evaluated. In order to maintain a high organizational performance, the Doka GmbH, an international company active in the formwork business, is re-evaluating their applied centralized supply strategy. The aim of this Master’s Thesis is to provide decision support for the evaluation process. Therefore, a literature research is conducted to evaluate alternative supply chain concepts. In detail, especially the application of lateral transshipments, inventory pooling and warehouse consolidation are discussed concerning their application in a centralized and decentralized context and advantages and disadvantages are analyzed. Furthermore, the problem setting is formulated as a linear model and implemented in the optimization software FICO® Xpress. Afterwards, the results are compared and different centralization approaches are ranked. This ranking is conducted according to the cost efficiency potential of those approaches in terms of transportation costs and general advantages or disadvantages extracted from literature. The outcomes display a trend towards the maintenance of centralized features. The combination of a centralized managed supply chain with decentralized features such as inventory pooling and lateral transshipments show advantages in terms of total transportation costs. The central warehouse proves to be reasonable at least in terms of transportation costs.