It is the goal of the Warehouse Excellence Study to support executives of distribution centers within the continuous improvement process. For that purpose, we offer a structured and standardized procedure for evaluating the performance of distribution centers. The study evaluates both efficiency (doing things right) and effectiveness (doing the right things) and points out opportunities for improvement.
Benchmarking allows products, performances and processes to be evaluated, thereby identifying inefficient processes and performance gaps and deriving potential starting-points for future improvements.
The methodology of benchmarking itself is not new to the process of comparing distributions centers. The following comparative approaches can be identified:
2. Technically oriented approaches, which compare the same realizations with each other (e.g. a comparison of automatic high bay warehouses). With this approach, the reasonability of the realization according to the specific requirements cannot be analyzed.
3. Selective approaches which are tailored specifically to a few participating distribution centers. Because of their small scope, these approaches are very limited in their generality.
Because of the limitations of these appoaches, the Distribution Center Reference Model (DCRM), a task oriented reference model, has been developed within the Warehouse Excellence Study. Further components of the Warehouse Excellence Study complete this reference model to form a standardized method of evaluating the performance of distribution centers.