İşletmelerde Dağıtım Sistemi Maliyetleri Minimizasyonu İçin Çözüm Modeli: Bir Firma Uygulaması

It is crucial for the firms, which aim to sustain their profitability and to survive, to reduce their operational costs within an environment where competition kept rising. For this reason, minimisation of distribution costs has attracted a special interest as it explains a large share of total costs. However, minimisation of distribution costs is a very complex problem to solve because of the fact that distribution costs have various dimensions and thus carry a high level of uncertainty. A large number of firms in our country try to overcome this uncertainty using their previous experience. But, this approach does not allow to capture all the dimensions of the distribution at the same time and therefore, experience is an inadequate method to use in this matter. Nevertheless, in the literature, the use of the Integer Linear Programming (ILP) is often emphasised to be one of the most efficient way to overcome this problem. In this article, the practical formulation of the ILP model that normally involves a very complex theoretical structure has been shown step by step, thereby top management of firms operating different industries can easily adapt for their firms. In addition, a general ILP model developed in this article has applied to the data obtained from a firm operating in food industry with 24 distributing agent and the results indicated that distribution cost of the firm can be reduced about 6% using the ILP model compared to the experience based distribution costs.