¹Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

Correspondence: M Köksalan, Industrial Engineering Department, Middle East Technical University, 06531 Ankara, Turkey. E-mail: koksalan@metu.edu.tr

Received November 2002; Accepted April 2004; Published online 2 June 2004.

Abstract

We outline our analysis of the product delivery system of a major beer producer in Ankara, Turkey. We demonstrate a savings potential of up to 25% of distribution costs from the implementation of a number of suggested improvements, most notably that of reducing the number of weekly deliveries to a portion of the customers, and of constructing a geographical partitioning of the city that ensures a balanced distribution of the delivery workload over the days of the week. A geographic information system (GIS) is used to extract coordinate and distance information to be used in the partitioning and sequencing problems. A discussion of the difficulties involved in implementing a GIS project in Turkey is included.