| In this new competitive era, cross-company collaboration in product development, standardizing and communizing supply base, sharing flexible manufacturing platforms, using common inbound and out bound logistics service providers and warehousing etc. can play vital roles for the US automakers to reduce overall cost and return to profitability. The collaboration in the intra- and inter-OEM outbound logistics operations is a critical area that the US automakers need to pay attention and prioritize in their cost reduction initiatives. Through the horizontal collaboration in the outbound logistics operations, these companies can create close-knit business partnership and act faster than the foreign rivals in delivering finished vehicles at the optimum cost. The optimization of outbound logistics operations through consolidation and collaboration among OEMs has tremendous potential to contribute to the profitability by lowering the cost of transportation, in-house inventory, transportation time, and facility costs.;This research presents an integrated collaboration framework for the outbound logistics operations of the US automakers. In our framework, we propose three potential levels for the US automakers to form outbound logistics collaboration: operational, tactical, and strategic. We developed a capacitated multi-commodity multi-period minimum cost network flow (MCNF) model with frequency based shipments. We developed new models for inventory, lost sales, and expedited shipments and integrated in the MCNF model. Resulting baseline model is then reformulated through the novel linearization approaches for computational tractability. Operational, tactical, and strategic collaboration adaptations are developed using the baseline model. Stylized experiments are conducted for sensitivity analysis and a case study based on two major US automotive OEMs is performed for demonstration of the benefits. Our research results indicate that collaboration at all levels improves the delivery and cost performance of the Outbound Logistics Network Systems. |
