Tactical Shipping and Scheduling at Polaroid with Dual Lead-Times

Abstract

We report on a project with Polaroid Corporation in which we developed a supply chain model to provide decision support for planning production and transportation. Production occurs in Asia to serve world-wide demand. Production planners must determine both the production quantities as well as whether to ship by sea or by air. We develop a model to optimize a static version of this problem and then show how to use this static model in a dynamic setting. We test the model with data from Polaroid and show its effectiveness.