Análise da distribuição física e roteirização em um atacadista do Sul de Minas Gerais

Abstract

Everyday, thousands of vehicles are routed to assist the distribution of several kinds of products, obeying various criteria and constraints imposed by clients and providers. The wholesale market, which has been increasing significantly due to its functions importance to retails and industries, is also inserted in this context for the high complexity of the physical distribution process. As the complexity of the problems grows, there is the need for the study and use of systemic approaches and/or optimizations, enabling companies to obtain improvements in their processes. Considering such features and the wholesale market complexity, this work aims at analyzing the physical distribution and the operational routine of vehicle routing and scheduling of a wholesale company. After a bibliographical review on the main related topics, a case study was developed at “Atacado Vila Nova”, located in the South of Minas Gerais state – an important company which is in the market for more than 60 years and has an intense routing and physical distribution process. For the development of the case study the following data sources were used: documentation, file registers, direct observation and structured interview. As a final result, a general description of the physical distribution operational process was made seeking to identify the factors considered critical in the process. Careful attention was paid to the process of vehicle routing and scheduling, always referring to the concepts from the specialized literature. As a general conclusion, it is possible to state that the company, despite of using several concepts and support tools in its physical distribution process – especially a powerful routing software – , still suffers the effects of lack of information in technically simple operational processes (as the road distances among clients). Thus, the process ends up being rationalized instead of optimized, and, in several phases, it becomes extremely dependent on the human factor, i.e., on the practical experience of the professional involved in such process.