Improvement of material handling routing in warehouses and transportation operations in an automotive parts industry

Abstract

To improve the material handing routing in a warehouse in an automotive parts industry and to improve transportation operations in that company. The warehouse department and delivery department are in focus in the case study factory. The methodology in this thesis can be adapted to other factories or industries of the same feature. The warehouse stores more than 500 items. The items are stored based on items' models. However, the frequency in ordering each item is not considered. Therefore, the locations for some items are not appropriate. In addition, the routing for material handling are not considered. The routes are planned only by the experience of the warehouse workers. In the transportation operations, some routes to customers are not optimal because there are many new routes to some customers. In addition, the existing delivery shedule is out of date. However, these problems can be solved by the following proposals. Warehouse : items are reallocated based on the frequency of use or ordering. A new warehouse layout using the Nearest Neighbour Heuristic technique is proposed in this thesis to plan the material handling routes. Transportation : New routes to customers are investigated and the time to each customer is measured, and then the new delivery schedule and the routes have been proposed. As a result of this thesis, the distance up to 46.55% could be reduced for material handling in the warehouse. In transportation, the proposed delivery schedule and the routes can reduce the cost of transportation up to 35,000 baht per year or 10.75%.