Custos e otimização de rotas no transporte de leite a latão e a granel: um estudo de caso

Abstract

At present times, an increase is observed in the attention paid to structural aspects such as handling and management of the milk production chain, as a means for achieving the necessary conditions to compete in the national segment of the global context. From the beginning of the 1970's on, with the increase in fuel prices, the first path raw milk transportation would come to nave a greater participation in the production cost of a litter of milk reaching 4% to 25% of the final cost. Besides, the market-oriented demand for higher-quality products caused technological improvements to arise, such as the bulk milk transportation, which was first performed in the 1940's in the U.S.A. and introduced in Brazil in 1985. Thus, this work puts forward an analysis, economically speaking, on the switching from the collection of milk in cans to the bulk milk collection, especially the aspects which involve transportation costs. The study is based on simulations referred to in the Route of Vehicles in Vértices Problem, which is a mathematical model for optimizing routes, from the SisGRAFO software, and in the analysis of costs, considering the equilibrium point. The site chosen was the milk producing region of Bom Sucesso city, Minas Gerais, where the study technical and economical indexes were collected. Posterior to the gathering of data, the simulations were performed, one of them based on the optimization of the "can" system, and the other one on the introduction of "bulk" collection system. The fared results indicated possibilities of shortening the collection route for both cases, especifically one of 11.96% for the "can" case and 8.01% for the "bulk" case. There was a reduction onthe number ofvehicles necessary for transporting such volume of milk, so a better volume scale of milk transported per vehicle was obtained. In the "bulk"case the results indicated the need for only three vehicles whereas five were needed for the optimized "can" case and seven for the actual "can" case. Such reduction enable for a better use of the vehicles, resulting in decreasing costs per litter of transported milk. Results indicated that a payment system based on RS/litter of transported milk can work as an award for the efficiency in the collection system, whereas the R$/km system does not imply that the agents involved are commited to searching for more efficient routes