Delivery system and method for vehicles and the like

摘要

A product delivery system that moves products from manufacturing plant to destination. Particularly applicable to the delivery of vehicles from vehicle assembly plants to dealerships, the system utilizes a centralized management organization overseeing independent entities in a delivery network, and provides a management team with improved visibility of and improved tools for operating the network, such as a tracking system by which managers in many parts of the network have access to the status of individual products and network facilities, a simulation tool by which managers can test scenarios for the purpose of changing product routing plans based on predicted capacity and bottlenecks, and a planning tool that can facilitate preparation of product routing plans in response to information from the other tools. The system also uses feedback from the delivery network to influence the sequence in which the products are manufactured.