My experience

Overview

I worked for the supply chain division of Home Depot in the delivery team, which focuses on managing transportation costs for company-owned distribution centers as well as 3rd party vendor distribution centers. The primary action of the team is to create unique solutions and recommendations to reduce transportation costs for deliveries by way of analytical insights. The team owns or has access to any database that might be needed to see transportation costs and related stats from a high level to a hyperspecific low level. My primary project goal as an intern was to reduce transportation costs on online orders shipped from 3rd party vendors by finding opportunities to consolidate multi-item orders - contingent upon it bringing financial benefit. I did this by way of a 'generalized bin packing' R model that took the dimensions and weight of any items that were ordered together as inputs and matched them to known boxes' weight capacities and dimensions in order to output specific boxes to use for such an order. In order to prove the model's utility, I ran the model on historical data and compared the results of the theoretical transportation costs that would have been if an order was consolidated by the model's recommendations versus the actual transportation costs that were. On the back end of the project, my team and I were able to meet with vendors to present the findings and begin rolling out a pilot to implement package consolidation procedures.