Improvements in a DSV warehouse through a WMS implementation

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Everton Jorge Aires dos
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/18277
• topic: Warehouse Management System (WMS); WMS Implementations; Key Performance Indicators (KPI); Warehouse Improvement; Stock Management; Implementações WMS; Indicadores de Desempenho (KPI); Melhoria do Armazém; Gestão de Stock

The purpose of this study is to present a solution to a problem in the DSV warehouse of Vila do Conde - the inefficiency of the system used to manage warehousing and storage operations. The goal was to achieve improvements to the performance of the warehouse and increase efficiency through the implementation of the warehouse management system internally created by DSV (ILIAS). This study focused, firstly, on a thorough literature review, that allowed for an understanding of relevant subjects for the study. The method utilized to achieve the goal initially set was the implementation of the warehouse management system ILIAS. The implementation was divided into 4 phases: business requirements, configuration, testing and deployment. The results were collected after the testing phase - a functionality checklist to assess the viability of the WMS, a new scheme for the process flow within the warehouse for inbound and outbound operations, and a comparison between the values of the warehouse performance indicators from before the implementation and after the implementation. The analysis of the functionality checklist led to the conclusion that the WMS solution can perform the fundamental operations for managing a warehouse. However, the results collected demonstrated that of the 63 checked functionalities, the software implemented only possessed 27 (about 43%). The addition of the WMS solution for managing inbound and outbound operations resulted in a change of the process flow of the warehouse for the activities of inbound and outbound. These changes led to improvements measured by several warehouse performance indicators. The results showed that the average picking time suffered a reduction after the implementation of the WMS. The percentage of time gained was between 9% and 15% for each client which corresponds to a total reduction of 363 minutes (6.05 hours) in picking time for the period of a month. In addition to the picking time reduction, KPIs were measured, namely the storage utilization, dock to stock time, order accuracy, orders per hour, movements per hour and inventory accuracy. The results for the measurement of the KPI’s showed an improvement of 3% for the storage utilization, 68% for the average dock to stock time, 12% for the order accuracy, 26% on the number of orders picked per hour and 30% for the movements executed per hour. The inventory accuracy had no term of comparison but with the implementation of the presented solution this KPI reached an accuracy of 99%. In an overall analysis, the goals initially set were achieved and this research adds relevant literature on a pertinent topic, contributing to the scientific community. It is also a great contribution to DSV since, despite the discovered limitations of the software that led to DSV deciding not to continue further with the implementation, this work shows the improvements that can be achieved with the implementation of a WMS which led the company to maintain in its plans the idea of implementing a WMS in its warehouse but with another software.