Speaker: Dr Jamie Fairbrother (Lancaster University)
Hosted by: University of Liverpool Management School's Operations and Supply Chain Management (OSCM) Group
Open to: OSCM Group staff and students, with no sign up needed
Date: Thursday 18 January 2024
Time: 2-4pm
Online: join Zoom meeting here
- Passcode: LW22=6BA
In person: Management School - Seminar Room 6
Abstract
In any retail business, packaging is essential for the protection and transportation of products. Excessive packaging however, increases costs, and can be off-putting to environmentally-conscious customers. It is therefore important to reduce packaging as much as possible.
In this work, we consider the problem of selecting packaging options for dispatching eCommerce orders.
In particular, we need to select around a dozen box sizes to use for dispatch in such a way that: (i) we can cover almost all orders, (ii) the selected boxes satisfy courier restrictions on size and (iii) we optimize key metrics such as packing efficiency.
We model this as a two-stage stochastic program which explicitly incorporates how selected boxes are used for packing for large sample of orders.
We demonstrate this approach using data from a large UK retailer, and our results show that significant improvements in packing efficiency are possible compared to the set of boxes currently being used for dispatch.
Speaker
Dr Jamie Fairbrother is lecturer of operational research at Lancaster University. His research is primarily focused on optimization under uncertainty, and in particular scenario generation for stochastic programming.
He has also worked on applications in logistics and telecommunications, and developed several software packages for his research and more broadly for statistics. He has published papers in Mathematical Programming, INFORM Journal on Computing, Transportation Science and European Journal of Operational Research.
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