AMC Upcoming Events

Transportation Challenges in Perishable Supply Chains

Dr. Gary Gaukler is an associate professor at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, where he also directs the Center for Supply Chain and Logistics. His academic interests are focused on quantitative analytics methods applied to operations and supply chain issues. Dr. Gaukler is particularly interested in the impact of automatic identification and sensor technologies such as RFID on supply chain and logistics.

Prior to joining the Drucker School, he was a faculty member in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, as well as in the Department of Information & Operations Management, both at Texas A&M University. He is published in academic and business-oriented journals on the topics of RFID technology, retail operations, inventory control, logistics and supply chain visibility, emergency preparedness, and homeland security.

Dr. Gaukler is active in consulting for industry in the areas of RFID, operations management, and supply chain management. His clients have included UPS, Hewlett-Packard, Applied Materials, and Volkswagen. He also frequently serves as an expert witness in patent infringement and class-action lawsuits.

Abstract

In this talk I will first provide an overview of the unique challenges that are encountered in perishables supply chains. I will then focus on a particular issue: how to make distribution decisions based on product freshness information. To investigate this latter part, I will describe the model of a supply chain that transports a perishable product from product origin to a destination market via a waypoint. The operational decision of interest is the transportation mode choice from the waypoint to the destination market, dependent on available information, including time and temperature history via RFID and sensors. I will show how to derive optimal transportation policies and generate generalizable, managerial insights. I will also demonstrate how this model can be used in a numerical case study investigating the transportation of vine- ripened tomatoes from the Netherlands to the United States.

Tuesday, April 25, 2023, at 4:15 p.m. (PT) in HMC’s Shanahan Skycube 3460