Vessel Management System - First Step

Hi guys..This is my first blog, my first article!!Really happy can share my experience here. I hope my english is good enough to share it to you. Oke let’s go. Here you go.

Currently I am working on one of Multi-Companies in Indonesia. Let’s call it "A", hahahahaha. Nowadays “A” is growing faster, both the market area and the organization. In Indonesia, if you want to larger the market you have to think the strategy in term of supply chain. Why? If you sea Indonesia Map, it will show you vast sea with many islands there. Thus “A” must be think about sea distribution using ship to distribute their product from production point to consumption point.

That what I face now. I have to manage several ships to maintain stock level at number of consumption point.

Source:  (Christiansen, 2007)

Fig. 1. The inventory level at port 3 during the planning horizon

Fig. 1 describe my job now. I have to fulfill the stock before its level touch the safety stock level. Imagine you have 8 ship with 3 loading port (production point) and 7 discharge port (consumption point), your brain will act like computer. I have to calculate several possible combination, choose the best one and do this everyday. Hufff, that really exhausting.

That’s why I propose this project to my manager:

Vessel Management System.

A Computer Based Decision to Manage Inventory & Ship Scheduling.

To make it simple I give the executive summary below.

Thanks to researchers who already work in this field. By reading their reports I know what I will face and how to manage it. Hereunder some references that are used:

§  Christiansen, M., & Fagerholt, K. (2009). Maritime Inventory Routing Problems. Encyclopedia of Optimization , 1947-1954.

§  Christiansen, M., Fagerholt, K., Flatberg, T., Haugen, Ø., Kloster, O., & H. Lund, E. (2008). Maritime inventory routing with multiple products: A case study from the cement industry. Elsevier .

§  Christiansen, M., Fagerholt, K., Nygreen, B., & Ronen, D. (2007). Maritime Transportation. Handbooks in Operations Research and Management , 14, 189–284.

§  Fagerholt, K. (2002). A Computer-Based Decision Support System for Vessel Fleet Scheduling-Experience and Future Research. Elsevier .

OK, enough for today. I’ll continue it tomorrow.See yaaa..