Warehousing

Storing inventories is inevitable for many companies because of uncertainty of demand for products and inability of instant deliveries on all customer orders. Companies try to store inventories in such a way as to reduce their overall logistics costs and to reach higher levels of customer service through better alignment between supply and demand. Warehousing and product storage mainly take place at nodal points of a supply network. Therefore, warehousing is an important part of logistics systems for a long time.

Warehousing

Warehouses

Warehouses are nodal points at and between the origin and destination points within supply network, which store goods and provide the management with information about the status, disposition, and condition of inventories / stock (Logistics, 2011).

What is slot?

Slot (short for storage location) is a generic term for any of a variety of different types of identifiable storage locations, e.g.,

• racks,
• bins,
• marked-off floor areas for block storage.

Each slot-item combination has an associated capacity corresponding to the number of units of the item that can be stored in the slot.

Storage policy

Closest open location (or COL) policy is storing and retrieving a unit at the nearest (i.e., least handling effort or cost) available location in order to minimize the handling costs for the units within a SKU.

Dedicated (or Fixed Slot) Storage policy - each SKU has a predetermined number of slots assigned to it.

Randomized (or Open Slot or Floating Slot) Storage policy - each SKU can be stored in any (usually the closest) available slot.

Class-based Storage - a combination of dedicated and randomized storage, where each SKU is assigned to one of several different storage classes.

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