Companies, especially in the consumer goods industry, have realized the
importance of flexibility in their distribution networks for the
provision of high customer service levels. The challenge is to determine
how flexibility potentials such as excess capacities in storage and
transport should be set up and utilized as an integral part of
distribution planning. Flexibility planning shall avoid unused
flexibility potentials that represent cost drivers and insufficient
flexibility alike. It needs to consider constraints such as lead times
and dependencies between different adaptation measures. In addition,
flexibility is a property which depends on future conditions, and
anticipating the future development of the demand complicates the
planning task and increases the complexity of the planning problem. The
author presents a planning model that incorporates flexibility decisions
into the distribution planning. The use of a stochastic model allows for
the consideration of demand scenarios and enables a flexible reaction to
unforeseen changes. The planning model anticipates the development of
the material flow and accounts for the temporal gap between the periods
in which flexibility measures are implemented and the periods in which
the beneficial effects in terms of high service levels develop. Its
contribution to theory and practice could be demonstrated by means of
different evaluation cases with involvement of companies from the
consumer goods industry. Dominik Pfeiffer, born 1985, studied
Information Systems at the University of Munster, Germany. During his
doctoral studies he worked as a Research Assistant at the European
Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS). In May 2014 he obtained
the degree of Doctor of Economics (Dr rer. pol.) from the School of
Business and Economics at the University of Munster. Since 2014 he works
as an IT Architect in the Strategy and Architecture division of a German
utility.
