Warehouse Management Improvement for a Textile Manufacturer

This research aims to improve an inefficient warehouse management of a textile manufacturer in Thailand who has been facing an unpredictable seasonable demand and operated under poor space utilization. A few hours of downtime often occurred in a day which directly impacted on the production and in turn led to the late weekly shipment. On average, in 2018, only 83% of the shipments were on time (the target is 95%). One of the main root cause was the lack of materials due to unorganized inventory management that caused longer time to find materials. In order to reduce the downtime and improve the space utilization of the warehouse, inventory management and warehouse management systems were reviewed and a number of solutions were introduced. Firstly, inventories were classified and slow-moving or unused items were removed from the warehouse. Secondly, ABC analysis was introduced for the active ones. The layout of the warehouse was re-designed and a new operations system was developed. The result shows that inactive items had occupied most of the warehouse space equivalent to 1,342 pallets which were put in the disposal list. Moreover, new material handling equipment was brought into the warehouse to facilitate its operations.