Jan C Fransoo

Tilburg University | UVT · School of Economics and Management

Batch process industries are characterized by complex precedence relationships among operations, which makes the estimation of an acceptable workload very difficult. Previous research indicated that a regression-based model that uses aggregate job set characteristics may be used to support order acceptance decisions. Applications of such models in...

Although anecdotal evidence suggests that co-location of logistics establishments can bring about several benefits for the co-located logistics firms. These benefits have not been widely researched. This article seeks to contribute to an understanding of the spatial concentration of logistics establishments by empirically analysing the synergies th...

We study the strategic problem of a logistics service provider managing a (possibly heterogeneous) fleet of vehicles to serve a city in the presence of access restrictions. We model the problem as an area partitioning problem in which a rectangular service area has to be divided into sectors, each served by a single vehicle. The length of the route...

In this work, we develop a mixed integer linear optimization model that can be used to select appropriate sources, capture technologies, transportation network and CO2 storage sites and optimize for a minimum overall cost for a nationwide CO2 emission reduction in the Netherlands. Five different scenarios are formulated by varying the location of s...

A variety of activity-based methods exist for estimating the carbon footprint in transportation. For instance, the greenhouse gas protocol suggests a more aggregate estimation method than the Network for Transport and Environment (NTM) method. In this study, we implement a detailed estimation method based on NTM and different aggregate approaches f...

Various entities, such as startups, suppliers, and governments, face substantial difficulties in convincing nanostore shopkeepers to adopt digital technologies. Given the informal status of nanostores, we posit that shopkeepers experience Tax Privacy Concerns from their operational records potentially becoming transparent to the tax authorities, wh...

Problem definition: As the largest retail channel in the world, nanostores are the source of income for millions of shopkeepers in developing countries. Being cash constrained, nanostore shopkeepers face the challenge of deciding how much of their available cash to retain to support their families and how much to invest in acquiring products from t...

Millions of mom‐and‐pop nanostores dominate the grocery retail landscape in emerging markets. As nanostores are cash and storage space constrained, their suppliers tend to visit them with a high frequency, causing high operational costs. It is unclear if credit could mitigate such costs by allowing for a lower visit frequency. To investigate this,...

As firms become progressively more tightly coupled in global supply chains, rather than being large vertically integrated monoliths, risks and opportunities associated with activities, upstream or downstream, will increasingly impinge upon their own well-being. For a firm to thrive, it is increasingly imperative that it be aware of economic, enviro...

Green location models are an important alternative to reduce CO2 emissions in logistics, i.e., transportation, which is one of the main contributing factors to global carbon emissions and the sector with the highest growth. In this chapter, we discuss green facility location problems, i.e., a variant of facility location problems that specifically...

This chapter discusses several important aspects related to supply chain carbon footprinting. It presents the main motivations for carbon footprinting and describes how carbon footprints can be measured. It introduces different carbon accounting methods, ranging from direct measurement-based to extrapolation-based ones. It also provides an example...

Original equipment manufacturers (OEM) may have little or no control over third-party (3P) refurbishing firms. With the rapid growth of the refurbished market for electronic products, we study whether it is beneficial for an OEM to cooperate with a 3P via authorization schemes that boost an OEM’s brand reputations, increase their sales, and strengt...

Urban freight is growing fast, and its adverse effects bring consequences for the residents, the environment, and the liveability of cities. Although understanding its dynamics has become a priority for governments, the multiplicity of actors with conflicting objectives makes it a significant urban planning challenge. This study focuses on one type...

Problem definition: Online retailers are on a consistent drive to increase on-time delivery and reduce customer lead time. However, in reality, an increasing share of consumers places orders early. Academic/practical relevance: Such advance demand information can be deployed strategically to reduce costs and improve the customer service experience....

Refurbishing has promising economic potential, yet firms remain wary of its potential cannibalization effect on new product sales. Firms need to make strategic choices in competitive settings, involving varying brand strengths and collection constraints. The current study provides an empirical characterization of consumer behavior in such complex s...

When the COVID‐19 pandemic began in 2020, the medical product industry faced an unusual demand shock for personal protective equipment (PPE), including face masks, face shields, disinfectants, and gowns. Companies from various industries responded to the urgent need for these potentially life‐saving products by adopting ad hoc supply chains in an e...

In most dense urban environments in emerging markets, retail deliveries are very fragmented to thousands of nanostores. It is not uncommon for a delivery route to include more than 60 stops. Unloading bays are often blocked by regular traffic. Due to the complex urban environment, it is difficult to estimate the benefits of making unloading bays av...

In this paper, we study the influence of seasonal demands and forecasts on the performance of an Automatic Pipeline, Variable Inventory, Order-Based, Production Control System (APVIOBPCS) using linear control theory. In particular, we consider a system that uses a seasonal forecast based on a no-trend, additive-seasonality exponential-smoothing mod...

We study supplier–buyer relationships in smallholder agri-food supply chains with equity concerns and under stakeholder engagement. We develop a game theoretic model to study the impact of these socially responsible practices in investment and pricing decisions. We model this as a Stackelberg game and study the impacts of the power structure in the...

Truck congestion at chemical sites is a persistent problem that is difficult to solve, even using a truck appointment system. This study presents an alternative solution to improve the flexibility of chemical sites by creating a drop-swap terminal adjacent to the site location. The terminal serves as an intermediate depot where the trucks can drop...

Making deliveries of Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) to small retailers in dense areas is a challenge. This has different levels of impact between high-income and low-income neighborhoods. They are more evident in megacities in developing countries, where there is a clear division between classes. On the one hand, governments do not attend low-in...

Omnichannel retailing and digitalization result in considerable challenges for the management and optimization of retail operations. The continued demand of quantitative insights, their practical need, and the growing availability of data motivates an increasing number of scientists and practitioners to intensify research on demand and supply-relat...

As freight deliveries in cities increase due to retail fragmentation and e-commerce, parking is becoming a more and more relevant part of transportation. In fact, many freight vehicles in cities spend more time parked than they are moving. Moreover, part of the public parking space is shared with passenger vehicles, especially cars. Both arrival pr...

Switching options can be deployed in various complex switching problems such as tolling agreements and the offshoring-backshoring problem. Closed form solutions to valuing switching options are not only hard, but also computationally intensive when solving numerically. We develop a new computational method to value switching options based on the mo...

The bullwhip effect is a supply chain phenomenon that results in the amplification of demand variability from a downstream site to an upstream site. There is ample anecdotal evidence of the bullwhip effect in real life, often manifesting itself as a disconnect between the demand observed at the end-market level and the demand observed by upstream c...

In developing economies, nanostores (i.e., small independent neighbourhood stores) in urban and rural areas face different infrastructural, operational and financial challenges. How can urban nanostores compete with supermarket chains as they enter the market? How can rural nanostores provide more services at affordable prices to sustain their oper...

In this paper, we will study a typical problem in inland container shipping, concerning the barge transportation of maritime containers between a dry port and a set of seaport terminals. The barges depart from the dry port and visit a set of sea terminals, where containers need either to be dropped off or picked up. The goal is to achieve economies...

We study a supply chain that consists of a buyer and two suppliers. The buyer faces stochastic demand and has two different supply sources for the same product: a slower regular supplier and a more expensive expedited supplier. Such dual sourcing inventory systems have been widely studied in the literature, evaluating what is best for the buyer. As...

Intermodal hinterland transportation is becoming increasingly critical for global container supply chains. Managing intermodal hinterland networks is challenging because multiple actors often interact in practice. The intermodal hinterland network design games that we propose enable assessing the impact of having noncooperative users in intermodal...

We extend our validated system dynamics models that we deployed 11 years ago during the credit crisis to model the production lockdown caused by the Covid-19 crisis. We estimate the supply chain dynamics that we may see unfold over the next few months. Our results suggest that inventory dynamics may be very large, caused by dramatic drops in demand...

Numerous studies have proposed the use of a Truck Appointment System (TAS) to alleviate traffic congestion at logistics sites. Unfortunately, the implementation of such a system was often optimised based on the interest of a single stakeholder. Meanwhile, long truck queues have been observed in many chemical plants. This study aims to evaluate the...

In emerging markets, a significant share of the revenue of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) manufacturers comes from the traditional retail channel, composed of millions of independent family-owned nanostores. Nanostore owners typically have limited cash flow and are driven by the modest goal of making a living. It is common practice for manufacturers...

Many port authorities have developed ambitious strategies to foster hinterland intermodal transportation. In addition, port-centric logistics, that is, the provision of distribution facilities and value-adding activities in the port area, has expanded in multiple ports. Obviously, such port-centric logistics may impact the operations in the hinterl...

Problem definition: Nanostores are traditional, small and independent retailers that are present in large numbers in the megacities of the developing world. Consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers can choose to deliver to nanostores either directly—visiting thousands of stores per day—or via wholesalers—saving on distribution cost but forfeitin...

This work investigates urban freight transport and mobility in the São Paulo Metropolitan Region (SPMR) and its impact on transportation externalities. We considered externalities as congestion, gas emissions and accidents/incidents. We conducted a statistical analysis based on multiple data sources: cargo origins-destinations, urban mobility, nati...

The demand for goods transportation in emerging markets is fragmented, mainly due to the unstructured and informal ordering behavior of the many small, traditional retailers in these markets. In this paper, we study such small traditional retailers located in the neighborhoods of big cities in emerging markets. We call them nanostores. Although mod...

Millions of nanostores, small, independent and family-owned and operated stores, flock the cities in emerging markets and other developing countries. Fransoo et al. (2017) estimate that there are about 50 million nanostores globally. In developing markets in Central and Latin America, Africa, and Asia, they represent a large share of the consumer m...

Problem definition: We study a shipper transporting and selling a short life-cycle product to a destination market via two competing transportation service providers (i.e., carriers). The two carriers offer distinct speeds and competing freight rates, whereas customers in the destination market obtain higher utility if they receive the product earl...

The scheduler has been extensively studied from the point of view of their schedules, using operations research. However, the scheduler not only fulfils a decision-maker role but also an informational role, responding to requests and disruptions, both from the supply and the demand side. Responding in a timely manner to such requests and disruption...

In the Coordinated Delivery Problem (CDP), we study the Passive and Proactive Coordination strategies that coordinate the delivery among urban retail stores. We formulate the CDP as mixed integer programs and develop a matheuristic, the effectiveness of which is evaluated via newly generated instances. Our numerical study shows that, when the store...

We study a dual-mode inventory management problem of a high-value component where the customer demand and the regular transportation lead time are stochastic, and the review periods of the two modes are different. The manufacturer is subject to a chance credit constraint that bounds the working capital. To solve the resulting chance-constrained sto...

Despite the many advantages of containerization for goods transportation, the management of empty containers is a major disadvantage, driving costly repositioning operations. We investigate the potential for consignees to manage an inventory of empty containers at their location so as to enable direct reuse of these containers by consignors located...

New research has identified a surprising way to combat malnutrition in emerging economies: increase the efficiency of the supply chains that support small retailers.

Sustainability has long been recognized as a fundamental practice in manufacturing. In recent years, firms have been devoting resources to reduce their carbon footprint, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use. However, the problem of measuring and acting upon water risk in the supply chain has not yet been tackled in the literature. Unlike other e...

Supply chain risk management is becoming increasingly important due to a variety of natural and man-made uncertainties. We develop a methodology to evaluate the costs of disruptions and the value of supply chain network mitigation options based on a two-stage stochastic program. To solve the model, we rely on a solution scheme based on sample avera...

The objective of this paper is to identify antecedents of inventory agility (i.e., the capability to quickly adapt inventories to changes in demand) upon demand shocks based on the awareness‐motivation‐capability (AMC) framework and to explore the link between inventory agility and financial performance. We introduce an empirical measure of invento...

In this paper, we study the performance of an Automatic Pipeline, Variable Inventory, Order-Based Production Control System (APVIOBPCS) using linear control theory. In particular, we consider a system with independent adjustments for the inventory and pipeline feedback loops and the use of triple exponential smoothing (the Holt-Winters no-trend, ad...

In this paper, we study a hinterland empty container transportation system which consists of a sea container terminal and an inland container terminal. There are a hinterland container operator who is in charge of the hinterland container transportation and an ocean carrier who has an empty container depot at the sea container terminal. We utilize...

The objective of this study was to characterize how schedulers spend their time interacting with external parties. Time is the most critical resource at the disposal of schedulers; however, its usage has been overlooked by prior empirical studies. Seven schedulers for a total of nineteen 8-h shifts were observed. Detailed time data about their acti...

This article studies the allocation of CO2 emissions to a specific shipment in routing transportation. The authors show that this problem differs from a cost allocation problem specifically because the concavity condition does not hold necessarily in the CO2 allocation problem. This implies that a traditional cost allocation method cannot be straig...

We model a periodic review inventory system with non-stationary stochastic demand, in which a manufacturer is procuring a component from two available supply sources. The faster supply source is modeled as stochastic capacitated with immediate delivery, while the slower supply source is modeled as uncapacitated with a longer fixed lead time. The ma...

This book includes a unique set of case studies focusing on companies that have successfully created forward-looking approaches to retail operations over the world. The case studies included provide readers with a range of best practices, useful insights, and commercial and logistics strategies for serving diverse distribution channels. The authors...

The chapter describes how consolidation of Nutresa enabled it to merge existing sales forces, logistics, and other services within the dry food division.

Four trends will drive the future of nanostores: high-performance operations, frictionless retailing, disruptive e-commerce, and corporate social responsibility. Nanostores are here to stay!

In large cities in emerging economies, traditional retail is present in a very high density, with multiple independently owned small stores in each city block. Consequently, when faced with a stockout, consumers may not only substitute with a different product in the same store, but also switch to a neighboring store. Suppliers may take advantage o...

Many seasonal products are transported via ocean carriers from origin to destination markets. The shipments arriving earlier in the market may sell at higher prices, but faster shipping services can be costly. In this paper, we study a newsvendor-type shipper who transports and sells seasonal products to an overseas market, where the selling price...