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International audienceThis paper discusses the difficulty of controlling a complex project caused by the great number of performance indicators. The problem studied is how to allow project managers to better control the performance of their projects. From a literature review we noted several critical aspects to this problem: there are many dimensions for evaluating project performance (cost, time, quality, risk, etc.); performance factors should be able to be relevantly aggregated for controlling the project, but no formalized tool exists to do this. We suggest a method to facilitate project performance analysis via a multi-criteria approach. The method focuses on three particular axes for the analysis of project performance: project task, performance indicator categories, and a breakdown of the performance triptych (Effectiveness, Efficiency, Relevance). Finally, the MACBETH method is used to aggregate performance expressions. An application case study examining a real project management situation is included to illustrate the implementation

International audienceIn the modern supplier-customer relationship, Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) is used to monitor the customer's inventory replenishment. Despite the large amount of literature on the subject, it is difficult to clearly define VMI and the main associated processes. Beyond the short-term pull system inventory replenishment often studied in academic works, partners have to share their vision of the demand, their requirements and their constraints in order to fix shared objectives for the medium/long-term. In other words, the integration of VMI implies consequences for the collaborative process that links each partner's different planning processes. In this article we propose a literature review of VMI. Based on the conceptual elements extracted from this analysis, we suggest a VMI macro-process that summarises both operational and collaborative elements of VMI

International audienceIndustry servitisation, i.e. the manufacturing industry transition towards the integration of services, provides for strong opportunities of new business model development and implementation. However, managing the industrial transformation to such business models means decision-makers are confronted with high decisional complexity. Such dramatic changes affect most enterprise performance drivers, and the interactions of the multiple business and industrial factors influencing the overall company performance make it very difficult for managers to specify consistent and efficient industrial configurations for their business processes. This context explains a concrete need for developing servitisation-dedicated decision support systems (DSS). The objective of the decision aid developed in this paper is to provide operational support which integrates the specific business and industrial features of so-called ‘product–service systems’ in order to study the interactions of different types of performance factors, notably market-oriented versus industrial-oriented factors. These developments are applied to a French Small and Medium Enterprise (SME). The key added values of the paper are (1) to specify a modelling and simulation approach associated to a generic simulator adaptable to various industrial contexts, then (2) to illustrate the concrete decision support provided in a case study of an SME in the business of remanufacturing electrical equipment. The case study highlights capacity management issues in a servitisation context

International audienceAll works in the domain of Urban logistics demonstrated that these Freight Consolidation Centers contribute to limit the emission of carbon dioxide and air pollutants in the cities. However their economical business model is quite fragile. To increase the profitability of these platforms, it will be compulsory to enlarge the scope of their activities and to diversify their operating modes through additional services. This paper proposes a global overview on urban freight consolidation centers issues. A particular focus is made on the interoperability problematic associated to these centers' activities

In the paper, we propose a branch-cut-and-price algorithm for the two-echelon capacitated vehicle routing problem in which delivery of products from a depot to customers is performed using intermediate depots called satellites. Our algorithm incorporates significant improvements recently proposed in the literature for the standard capacitated vehicle routing problem such as bucket graph based labeling algorithm for the pricing problem, automatic stabilization, limited memory rank-1 cuts, and strong branching. In addition, we make some specific problem contributions. First, we introduce a new route based formulation for the problem which does not use variables to determine product flows in satellites. Second, we introduce a new branching strategy which significantly decreases the size of the branch-and-bound tree. Third, we introduce a new family of satellite supply inequalities, and we empirically show that it improves the quality of the dual bound at the root node of the branch-and-bound tree. Finally, extensive numerical experiments reveal that our algorithm can solve to optimality all literature instances with up to 200 customers and 10 satellites for the first time and thus double the size of instances which could be solved to optimality.

The paper studies the two-echelon capacitated vehicle routing problem with time windows, in which delivery of freight from depots to customers is performed using intermediate facilities called satellites. We consider the variant of the problem with precedence constraints for unloading and loading freight at satellites. In this variant allows for storage and consolidation of freight at satellites. Thus, the total transportation cost may decrease in comparison with the alternative variant with exact freight synchronization at satellites. We suggest a mixed integer programming formulation for the problem with an exponential number of route variables and an exponential number of precedence constraints that link first-echelon and second-echelon routes. Routes at the second echelon connecting satellites and clients may consist of multiple trips and visit several satellites. A branch-cut-and-price algorithm is proposed to solve efficiently the problem. This is the first exact algorithm in the literature for the multi-trip variant of the problem. We also present a postprocessing procedure to check whether the solution can be transformed to avoid freight consolidation and storage without increasing its transportation cost. It is shown that all single-trip literature instances solved to optimality admit optimal solutions of the same cost for both variants of the problem either with precedence constraints or with exact synchronization constraints. Experimental results reveal that our algorithm can be used to solve these instances significantly faster than another recent approach proposed in the literature.

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