Lean Warehousing - Gaining from Lean thinking in Warehousing

Abstract: This master thesis has been written during the autumn of 2007 and in the month of January 2008. It investigates how the Lean philosophy can be used in Warehousing businesses. Further it gives example of tools that can help Warehousing companies to become Leaner in their business. There is a contradiction between Lean Thinking and Warehousing practice today, since Lean strive at being just in time with a pull flow with no batching production and with preferably no inventory kept between the different processes. This is an ideal scenario. In real life there exist variation in demand, uncertainty in lead time and long lead times that cannot be fully predicted. This makes a warehouse necessary to provide items to the production, assembling or customer in time. The warehouses doesn?t add any extra value to the items themselves but only to customers by giving it in the time that the customer wants it, in the right amount and in the right quality. This makes the processes in the warehouse that is necessary for maintaining that ability; necessary non-value added processes. The other processes that aren?t necessary are just non-value added processes. The warehouse can also be preferred for distribution purposes. But since nothing the warehouse do with the item gives it more value in monetary terminology, little handling of the item as possible is to be preferred. But as mentioned before there are necessary non value added processes and there are those who are just non value added. The goal is to avoid the non value added activities and improve the necessary non-value added processes if they can?t be avoided as well. One way to improve the necessary value added process picking is to place the items in a matter that reduce the work for the picker when picking. It could be placing them in appropriate heights and on picking frequency to reduce travel time. This could be done by an ABC-classification on the picking frequency and dividing the picking area into zones depending on the ABC. Another way to improve the picking process is to visualize and assign the workload as optimal as possible. This could be done with the Heijunka concept together with the shipping order logic.