On the Suboptimality of Full Turnover-Based Storage

Yugang Yu and René de Koster

ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam

Abstract: In the past thirty years the full turnover-based storage policy as described by Hausman et al. (1976, Management Science 22(6)) has been widely claimed to outperform the commonly used ABC class-based storage policy, in terms of the resulting average storage and retrieval machine travel time. In practice however, ABC storage is the dominant policy. Hausman et al. (1976) model the turnover-based policy under the unrealistic assumption of shared storage, i.e. the storage space allocated to one product can only accommodate its average inventory level; no specific space is reserved to store the maximum inventory of a product. It appears that many authors citing Hausman et al.’s results overlook this assumption and use the resulting storage and retrieval machine travel times as if it were valid for full turnover-based storage. Full turnover-based storage is a dedicated storage policy where the storage space allocated to one product must accommodate its maximum inventory level. This paper adapts the travel time model of Hausman et al. to accommodate full turnover-based dedicated storage. Surprisingly, the result of the adapted travel time model is opposite to that of Hausman et al. (1976) but, in line with practice, it supports that ABC (2- or 3-) class-based storage normally outperforms full turnover-based storage.

Keywords: AS/RS; distribution science; storage policy; warehousing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L23 M M11 R4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-10-07
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repub.eur.nl/pub/16898/ERS-2009-051-LIS.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ems:eureri:16898

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePub ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).