The implementation of milk-run in Indonesia has been started since 2005. As a developing
country, there is a challenge to operate milk-run smoothly especially in urban area due to
severe traffic congestion and unfavourable road condition in some areas. This research aimed
to analyze the practice of milk-run operation in one of the biggest Japanese automotive
companies in Indonesia. Transportation Value Stream Mapping (TVSM) is applied in order
to perform just-in-time delivery in the supply chain before operating milk-run. It is discussed
that this company still need to continue in improving milk-run operation. The operation
system needs control and integration from manufacturer, supplier and logistics partner.
The advantage of milk-run operation is cost reduction and also support green logistics in
decreasing emission of carbondioxide (CO2) by reducing the number of trucks used.
The objective of the milk-run design problem considered in this paper is to minimize transportation
and inventory costs by manipulating fleet size and the capacity of vehicles and
storage areas. Just as in the case of an inventory routing problem, the goal is to find a periodic
distribution policy with a plan on whom to serve, and how much to deliver by what
fleet of tugger trains travelling regularly on which routes. This problem boils down to determining
the trade-off between fleet size and storage capacity, i.e. the size of replenishment
batches that can minimize fleet size and storage capacity. A solution obtained in the declarative
model of the milk-run system under discussion allows to determine the routes for each
tugger train and the associated delivery times. In this context, the main contribution of
the present study is the identification of the relationship between takt time and the size
of replenishment batches, which allows to determine the delivery time windows for milkrun
delivery and, ultimately, the positioning of trade-off points. The results show that this
relationship is non-linear.