a) Identify the challenges affecting the delivery performance and buffer levels in an in-house material handling system at BRL. b) Elaborate on the material handling system design principles which can overcome the identified challenges at BRL. c) Discuss the benefits that accrue as result of effective Material handling system at BRL.

BOSCH ROSSLE LIMITED Bosch Rossle Limited (BRL) located in Nairobi, Kenya is currently suffering from fluctuations in customer demand while on the other hand, the recent business environment requires an increase in company's delivery performance to sustain competitive in the market. Therefore, similar to other Bosch Rossle plants around the world, BRL started a project, called as NEWLOG, to cope with the challenges in global supply chain by integrating material and information flows effectively and attaining improved and standardized logistic processes. The project has the overall targets of increasing delivery performance while maintaining low inventory levels, thereby, decreasing logistic costs. NEWLOG project will cover 10 different sub-projects which consider the whole supply chain from suppliers to customers, and this thesis work is carried out in co- operation with one of the subprojects; Material Supply. The primary goal of Material Supply project is to reach %100 delivery performance across the plant through continuous material flow. Several additional targets are attaining storage level reduction and inventory transparency, separation of value adding and non-value adding internal logistics activities, reduced handling effort with standardized transport devices, and improved information link between parties of material supply. Inefficiency in the current internal material supply system (IMSS) entails huge cost and customer dissatisfaction for BRL. This inefficiency in the IMSS can be analyzed under three main categories; non-fixed assembly schedule caused by suppliers' low delivery performance, material handling inefficiency resulted by high operation cost and massive manual transportation on the shop floor, and lack of information link between material supply and production departments. Additionally, mentioned problems above cause increased buffer levels and queues before production processes which make the situation even more critical since, Nairobi plant is already suffering from lack of space on the shop floor