Greenfield Analysis

A new home for the Coupa Supply Chain documentation

Starting with Supply Chain 42, our documentation will be located on Coupa Compass. The help here will continue to be accessible for the foreseeable future, but will no longer be updated. If you need a Compass user account, contact your company’s Designated Support Contact (DSC).

You can access new and updated Supply Chain documentation in the following location on Compass:

https://compass.coupa.com/en-us/products/supply-chain-design-and-planning

Greenfield Analysis

Greenfield analysis is intended to provide a quick answer to the following problem:

Given a set of customers, determine the best geographic locations of potential “greenfield" sites.

The best locations are those that minimize the total cost of shipping each customer’s demand over a distance given by their latitude/longitude coordinates.

The Latitude and Longitude values for the Sites and Customers must be non-zero.
If you are running Greenfield Analysis, do not set the Transportation Circuity Factor to 0. This value is set on the Model Settings > General tab. When the value is 0, the internal default of 14% is applied. You can successfully approximate the 0 value by setting Transportation Circuity Factor to a small value, such as 0.001.

There are several assumptions made in the greenfield calculations:

All customers have at least one demand record
All customers have only one site as a source (the closest site)
There is a uniform cost per mile/km, so the cost is primarily based on transportation distance.

If you encounter an infeasibility when running Greenfield Analysis, refer to the description of infeasibility diagnosis for Greenfield Analysis.

The optimizer returns a latitude/longitude pair for the greenfield DCs. Greenfield Analysis then locates the greenfield site based on the Greenfield Site Location Option you have selected. This is either the Greenfield Latitude/Longitude or the Closest City to Greenfield Latitude/Longitude.

Greenfield Analysis uses the straightline distance between the latitude/longitude values with the circuity factor applied. The Transportation Circuity Factor in Model Settings is used to determine a percentage to add to the straightline distance. For example, if the Transportation Circuity Factor is 17, the straightline distance is multiplied by 1.17 to provide a more accurate road distance.

Greenfield Analysis uses the default distance unit of measure that you select in Model Settings. The output generated by Greenfield Analysis will also reflect the units based on the selected distance unit of measure.

Last modified: Friday May 12, 2023

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