Abstract

Since 2017, there has been a very high demand for cement from end-users in the country. This demand is resulting in the high production of cement from various cement factories especially LEOCEM to meet its customers' demand. The bottleneck around this demand and supply is the timely delivery of cement to various Cities in the four regions (Eastern, Western Northern, and Southern) within the country. A huge pile of heavy-duty trucks storms the factory yard waiting to be loaded for distribution in the various cities and regions in the country. The aspect of transportation for timely delivery to distributors and cost has not been managed well to meet the customers' demand over the years.  This study focuses on locating a central warehouse or nearest point of cement distribution in the cities of the various regions, using the Distance-Based Approach considering the weighted demand of customers all over the country. This is to mitigate the cost of transportation, time of delivery and stabilize the profit merging of the company. The data collected was analyzed using Excel Solver to solve the facility location and demand weighted problem. The overall network structure of the study consists of three levels: Cement production plants in the first level, Distribution Centres (DCs) in the second one, and customers in the third level. The modeling choices used by this study can be relevant in other industrial contexts. The study introduces a clustering-based approach to model vehicle routing, minimum volume constraints to ensure full truckload transport, minimum and maximum throughput constraints on DCs, maximum covering distance constraints, and single-sourcing restrictions.

Keywords: Location-routing, minimum volume constraints, throughput, Distribution Centre (DCs), plants