1 OPERATIONS PLANNING AND STRATEGY OF MILK COLLECTION: DEVELOPING A PROCESS FOR OPTIMIZATION

The main goal of this study was to develop a software management program for milk collection, with regard to operations strategies (collection costs and fleeting). It was developed a mathematical model of milk collection defined through the Vehicles Path Vertices Problem, with each farm having specific access restrictions limiting what type of vehicle can make the collection, implying the use of the heuristic derived from the savings of Clark and Wright (CW). The data refer to producers supplying the Castrolanda Farming and Cattle Cooperative. 461 farms were entered into a database with variables: geographic position, type of cooling tank and its capacity, evaluation of conditions for vehicle access, and schedule of milking. Summarizing the optimization model, the general results were: 31 daily routes; 6.7 thousand km daily; average volume: 392.3 thousand liters; and unit cost of USD0.03/km and USD0.0068/liter. It is worth noting, as well, that the logistics management could become a strategic variable for business