Supply chain management in chemical process industries.

• Main Author: Sriram Srivatsav.
• Other Authors: Vinay Kumar Kariwala
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Chemical engineering::Chemical processes
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/16590
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

A supply chain consists of all the parties with which a company interacts in providing its final goods and services. With increasingly fierce competition, the need to constantly reduce life cycle times and production costs has seen the supply chains of companies come under significant scrutiny and their effective management has become extremely important. This report presents a thorough overview of the chemical industry supply chain, including its unique characteristics and the key factors that influence it. The increasing importance of adopting efficient supply chain management practices within this industry and some of the major challenges faced in managing supply chains are also discussed. Finally, the growing use of information technology for making supply chain management decisions is analyzed and its potential impact on the chemical industry is highlighted. To illustrate how information technology can aid in supply chain management, a typical tank allocation problem faced by storage terminal operators in the chemical industry is studied. The problem is first constructed into a multi-period mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model and subsequently solved with CPLEX solver using GAMS interface. The results help determine the most profitable contracts to be selected, and also provide the optimal dynamic allocation of these contracts to tanks such that the profits of terminal operators are maximized. Through careful implementation of the MILP model, the solution time taken for obtaining these results has been improved by as much as 80%, as compared to previous studies.