Operational characteristics and time series analysis of a home furniture delivery and assembly service in Indonesia

Abstract

This research extensively studied the characteristics of internal and outbound logistics operations, demand forecasting and issues of a home furniture delivery and assembly service (HFDAS) provider. The case studies are HFDAS Jakarta and Bangkok. The unified modelling language was used to breakdown the activities in the Value Stream Mapping (VSM) analysis. The performance evaluation was conducted to monitor the quality of service. Various time series analysis techniques were adopted to model and predict the daily demand. The results showed that transportation activity dominated the service time taking 52.6% of the average total time for delivery service. It was the key factor explaining the reason why transportation activity consumed 54% of the total cost in 2015. The long transportation time was caused by traffic congestion and the inefficient transport management, particularly route planning. Regarding the demand forecast, the Holt-Winters method showed the best accuracy and predictability in terms of mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and U-statistics. It is then proposed to be used to prepare better operational guidelines for labor, fleet and warehouse operations