The Center for Excellence in Logistics and Distribution (CELDi) in the Department of Industrial Engineering is working on a new project with Medline Industries. Medline is the largest privately held manufacturer and distributor of medical products and clinical solutions in the United States. The company provides more than 350,000 products to serve the entire continuum of care, including hospitals, long-term care facilities, home health agencies, physician offices, surgery centers and retail outlets. Their service network includes 40 distribution centers in North America and 50 throughout the world, a dedicated trucking fleet of more than 300 vehicles, and 17 manufacturing facilities worldwide.

Medline is interested in analyzing how their current forecasting process impacts operation and determining whether alternative processes would result in significant savings.

Ashlea Bennett Milburn, the principal investigator for this CELDi project, is an assistant professor of industrial engineering at the University of Arkansas. Her primary areas of teaching and research are in transportation logistics and healthcare systems engineering. Specifically, she studies how operations research tools and techniques can be applied to problems arising in the health care and logistics industries. 

Manuel D. Rossetti, the co-principal investigator for this CELDi project, is a professor in the industrial engineering department at the University of Arkansas. Rossetti has published over 85 journal and conference articles in the areas of transportation, manufacturing, health care, inventory modeling, forecasting, and simulation and he has obtained over $3.4 million in research funding. His research sponsors have included the Pine Bluff Arsenal, The Arkansas Science and Technology Authority, the Defense Logistics Agency, the Naval Systems Supply Command, the Air Force Research Laboratory, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the Transportation Research Board, US Department of Transportation, and the National Science Foundation. 

CELDi is a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center. At this center, engineering faculty from the University of Arkansas, Clemson University, Virginia Tech, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Missouri collaborate with members of industry to identify and carry out research projects in the area of logistics and distribution that are the most relevant to industry needs. CELDi's 15 member organizations come from commercial, military and government sectors of the economy.

For more information on the Medline project, contact Milburn at ashlea@uark.edu or 479-575-3702 or Rossetti at rossetti@uark.edu or 479-575-6756. For more information on CELDi, contact Rossetti.