Practice Summary: General Electric Company Optimizes Wind Turbine Towers Sourcing and Logistics Operations

Abstract

General Electric’s Renewable Energy business used to manually make annual sourcing and logistics plans to procure wind turbine towers from suppliers across the world and deliver them to customer sites. This process was time-consuming, cumbersome, suboptimal, and increased the cost of fulfilling customer demands. We developed an algorithm and a software tool to generate near-optimal towers’ sourcing and logistics plans, which minimized the total direct material and logistics costs incurred.