Increase of the number of internal trips in a steel company: A case of study

Looking forward to reduce their transportation expenses, the transport and traffic department of a steel company has implemented a system, which consists in a set of circuits developed to achieve a fast, efficient and low cost transportation, with a common origin and/or destination. These circuits have been called clusters. The clusters operate with contracts that prioritize the transport operation to contractors who cover them at a lower price per trip and with volume targets measured in terms of number of daily trips per truck. However, the contractors' expected performance in those clusters has not achieved the established targets for two of the four identified clusters. The objective of this project is to increase the daily trips per truck by 30 percentage points, in clusters one and four. DMAIC methodology was followed to accomplish this objective. For the accepted and implemented proposals, a post indicators vs. base line comparison was made, and for those unimplemented proposals, a discrete event simulation was developed by ProModel program, in order to estimate their impact.