Redesigning flows via European ports for Dow

Dow is a worldwide company with customers all over the world. Therefore, transportation is one of the important issues they are facing. Dow has been aware of the tight availability of transportation assets and of the increasing difficulty of meeting delivery requirements. The aim of this report is to provide a way to choose transfer countries for shipments via ports. It means that, based on our design, when products are transported from an origin to the final destination, the transfer country should be either the origin or the final destination. The report has two major parts, analyzing the current situation and redesigning flows via European ports. The current situation is analyzed by investigating the flows of Dow's inventories, and used time of Dow's voyages and shipments in a terminal. Then, internal and external interviews are conducted to get qualitative information. In the redesigning part, we provide alternative routes by using different transfer countries than the ones recorded in the FLSA database. When all alternatives are adopted in reality, 26% to 31% of yearly volume is expected to be changed. Feasibility of alternatives is discussed then. Conclusions and recommendations are at the end of the report, including concepts of different types of alternatives, and extra requirements of future studies.