Doctor of Philosophy (PHD), University of Arkansas
2014
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Abstract
The warehousing industry is extremely important to businesses and the economy as a whole, and while there is a great deal of literature exploring individual operations within warehouses, such as warehouse layout and design, order picking, etc., there is very little literature exploring warehouse operations from a systems approach. This study uses the Theory of Constraints (TOC) to develop a focused resource management approach to increasing warehouse capacity and throughput, and thus overall warehouse performance, in an environment of limited warehouse resources. While TOC was originally developed for reducing operational bottlenecks in manufacturing, it has allowed companies in other industries, such as banking, health care, and the military, to save millions of dollars. However, the use of TOC has been limited to case studies and individual situations, which typically are not generalizable. Since the basic steps of TOC are iterative in nature and were not designed for survey research, modifications to the original theory are necessary in order to provide insight into industry-wide problems. This study further develops TOC's logistics paradigm and modifies it for use with survey data, which was collected from a sample of warehouse managers. Additionally, it provides a process for identifying potentially constrained key warehouse resources, which served as a foundation of this study. The findings of the study confirm that TOC's methods of focused resource capacity management and goods flow scheduling coordination with supply chain partners can be an important approach for warehouse managers to use in overcoming resource capacity constraints to increase warehouse performance.
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Details
Title
Managing Warehouse Utilization
Resource Type
Dissertation
Publisher
ProQuest
Identifiers
99380497797206600
Language
English
Awarding Institution
University of Arkansas; Doctor of Philosophy (PHD)
Theses and Dissertations
Doctor of Philosophy (PHD), University of Arkansas