Effective supporting decisions tools for Logistics and Global Supply Chain

Modern industrial and service companies operating worldwide have to face with several logistics issues from facility layout and location to the management and control of the operating decisions such as vehicles loading and transportation, including sequencing and routing when the groupage strategy is adopted. Which is the best location of a production and/or distribution center? What about the stock inventory capacity and its geographical location? What about the allocation of demand of products from the final customers level to the source/production level passing from the wholesalers, the regional distribution centers level, central distribution centers, etc.? Logistics and supply chain management need models, methods and tools to face these issues simultaneously and eventually sequentially in agreement with a top-down modelling approach, which measures the level of interdependency between the very large number of involved decisions when the complexity is prohibitive. This paper deals with effective tools developed and applied by the Department of Industrial Engineering to support strategic, tactical and operating decisions in logistics and with a focus on feasibility in real application.