Distribution Network Design: Centre-of-Gravity Locations, Customer Assignment, Transport vs Warehouse Costs, Service Coverage & the Number of Depots

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Put ten towns on a kilometre grid, weight their coordinates with the yearly volume and find the centre of gravity, the classic first guess for where one warehouse should be.
• Measure straight-line distances from the centre of gravity, add up the tonne-kilometres and move the depot one improvement step towards the point with the lowest transport work.
• Read a towns × sites distance matrix, find the nearest site for every town with MIN and INDEX/MATCH, add up the volume each site would serve and measure the weighted average distance.
• Turn straight-line tonne-km into road kilometres, price outbound deliveries and inbound full-truck trunking from the plant, and total the transport cost of the four-depot network.
• Price four network scenarios: fixed cost only for open depots, handling cost per tonne, the total warehouse cost and a check whether any depot is over its capacity.
• Convert distances into drive hours, measure the share of volume that a 2-depot and a 3-depot network can reach within the delivery promise, and price each extra point of coverage.
• Estimate how the network's safety stock grows with the number of depots using a simplified square-root rule, price it as a holding cost and value the saving of consolidation.
• Add transport, warehouse and inventory cost for 1–4 depots, find the cheapest network, find the cheapest one that meets the coverage target and chart the cost build-up.