This data has been adapted from a real warehouse. If you use it for a purpose other than Georgia Tech’s ISyE 6335 class, please include the following acknowledgement “This data courtesy of warehouse-science.com”.

A tire distributor

This tire distributor stores all product on pallets. Each SKU may be stored either in bulk storage, which is 5-high floor-stack in a separate warehouse, or in the fast-pick area, which is 1-deep pallet rack. All pallets are of identical dimensions; but different SKU’s may have different numbers of pieces per pallet.

Here is a list of the SKU’s in the warehouse and something about their activity. Each row corresponds to one SKU and the columns correspond to the following fields:

• SKU ID
• Average # piece picks
• Average # quantity (in pallets) sold as pieces
• Average # full-pallet picks
• Average # quantity (in pallets) sold as full-pallets
• The minimum # pallets to be stored in the fast-pick area (if any at all)
• The maximum number of pallets expected to be on-hand at any time

Restocks of the fast-pick area average 3.5 person-minutes per pallet. Picks from the fast-pick area average 0.45 minutes per pick-line for less-than-pallet quantities and about the same per pallet for full-pallet picks; picks from bulk average 2.34 minutes per pick-line for less-than-pallet quantities and about the same per pallet for full-pallet quantities.

If a SKU is stored partly in the fast-pick area and partly in bulk storage, then all of its piece picks must come from the fast-pick area and all of its full-pallet picks must come from the bulk storage area.

Questions

• Which SKU’s should be in the fast-pick area and in what amounts? Answer this question for a fast-pick area of 2,000 pallet positions. How many person-hours of labor are expected to be required to move the product?
• How much would 500 additional pallet positions be worth to you?
• How does your answer above compare to the policy of storing the minimum allowable amount of your most popular SKU’s in the fast-pick area?
• How does your answer compare to the alternative of storing everything in bulk storage so the fast-pick area can be absorbed by manufacturing? How much would this cost (in labor hours)?

Suggestion: Use the pallet-slotting software to answer these questions.