Ingeniería (Jan 2018)
Warehouse Sizing based on Material Requirements Planning for a Polyurethane Coating Factory
Abstract
Context: the design of the warehouse is a key factor in the configuration of logistics systems, as it can facilitate the timely management of materials, intermediate and/or final products, improving the time, cost and levels of customer service. To achieve this, experts help is required to integrate within the design an appropriate combination of storage, manipulation of materials and selection of orders. This level of integration, however, has not yet been achieved since the advances in the subject have been addressed from different aspects of the storage problem, but independently. Method: the article presents a method for warehouse layout design in two phases. The first phase defines the variables and parameters that are obtained from the planning of the production; the second phase consists of five stages that culminate in the integral design of the warehouse. In this last phase a modified version of an existing mathematical model of sizing is applied, where a new equation is added. Results: the method is applied to a company that supplies liquid polyurethane in the construction sector. The design generates four options for configuration of shipping and receiving docks and five storage options, where the best option generates an average area, mean real capacity and percentage average of storage utilization of 374,8 m2, 360 pallet and 93,8% respectively. These results are coherent with the dynamics of the company. Conclusions: the method allows evaluating options of the flow configuration and their respective sizing than may influence decisions of great importance in the operational capacity of the company in the short, medium and long term. In the future research is interesting to include new conditions, for example the compatibility of the method with different distributions to the traditional configuration of parallel shelves.
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