A decision support tool for yard logistics in pharmaceutical industry

This study presents a Decision Support Tool (DST) for managing tankers on‐site at a Pharmaceutical Company. The objective of the DST is to minimize the operational costs related to receiving solvents and disposing waste by optimizing the decisions made by the yard manager considering the manufacturing, quality control and traffic departments. On the basis of the empirical data, it is concluded that the DST increased the dam utilization by 17 per cent, and reduced the total (move and delay) costs by 19 per cent, the total movements by the internal truck operator by 34 per cent, and the yard logistics operator duties by approximately 60 per cent. The DST can also be used as a tool to optimize the supply chain by improving the scheduling and to determine the number of dam spaces required, which has direct environmental implications. The simplicity of the tool and the quality of the results prompted interest from our industrial collaborator to implement the DST.