Information system design for transportation planning of a garment factory

Abstract

This thesis reports the design of an information system for supporting transportation planning of a garment factory in order to meet receipts and deliveries in time with low cost of transportation. The design of the information system consists of 5 parts: (1) the decision making process in delivery planning, (2) the delivery plan changing process, (3) database, (4) computer screens that support delivery planning, and (5) the business process. The nearest neighbor, which is a technique of heuristics, is applied to generate and change transportation plans using the transportation cost as the main criteria. Business flow charts, data flow diagrams, and data schema are used to explain the design of the database, the user interface, and the business process. The system evaluation shows that the proposed method of decision making process in delivery planning can reduce the transportation cost by 46% from the current method. The proposed delivery plan changing process can reduce the cost of delivery plan changes by 58% comparing to the method generated by the experienced transportation planner. In addition, the users of this information system are satisfied with the concept and the principle of the system, because it can solve present vehicle routing problem, reduce the complexity of making a decision, and practical to implement.