Creating a planning tool for company X

This thesis is conducted at a technical service company, in the centre of the Netherlands. The main activity of the company is conducting maintenance. The service engineers who conduct this maintenance need certain products in order to conduct this maintenance. These products are supplied from a central point in the Netherlands by the company itself. This process is currently not optimal. In order to improve the process, the inventory routing problem has been examined. Since the company prefers a simple solution for their employees, a simple deviation in delivery frequency is made. By solving two vehicle routing problems (one for every delivery frequency), a fixed schedule can be established for a four week period. The change in delivery frequencies and the heuristics used to solve the vehicle routing problem resulted in a decrease of 35,6% in total driven kilometres. All of this has been calculated by a planning tool made in Excel/VBA.