Reference no: EM132260990

Production, Manufacturing and Logistics Redesigning a warehouse network Emanuel Melachrinoudis a,*, Hokey Min b,1 a Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Northeastern University, 334 Snell Engineering Center, Boston, MA 02115 5000, USA b UPS Center for World Wide Supply Chain Management, Burhans Hall—Shelby, Suite LL23, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292, USA Received 8 June 2003; accepted 11 April 2005 Available online 14 August 2006

Abstract To take advantage of economies of scale, a growing number of firms have begun to explore the possibility of integrating supply chain activities. The advent of such a possibility would necessitate the redesign of a warehouse network. Typically, a warehouse redesign problem involves the consolidation of regional warehouses into a fewer number of master stocking points and the subsequent phase-out of redundant or underutilized warehouses without deteriorating customer services. This paper develops a mixed-integer programming model to solve the warehouse redesign problem. The usefulness of the model was validated by its successful application to a real-world problem and by its sensitivity analyses when used with changing scenarios within a warehouse network configuration.

Read article “Redesigning a Warehouse Network” . Answer the following questions in no more than two pages.

1. What is the problem addressed in this paper? What are the benefits and drawbacks of warehouses consolidation in a distribution network?

2. Briefly, in a few sentences (avoid symbols and equations as much as possible), describe the mathematical model developed in this paper. In particular, what is the objective, the sets, the decision variables, and the types of constraints in the model?

3. What type of optimization model and what algorithm/software were used to solve it? What was the size of the problem?

4. What kind of distribution the customer demand had?

5. Who provided the data for the model parameters?

6. Which solution was prescribed by the model for the 10-hours access time base line scenario (describe very briefly)?

7. Since the model is not linear, parameter ranges cannot be readily obtained. Then, how sensitivity analysis is conducted (as in this paper)? For which parameters sensitivity analysis was performed?

8. Assuming that any number between 8 and 13 hours of customer access time is acceptable/desirable, which access time would you pick, given the cost-service tradeoff obtained by sensitivity analysis in Fig 8?