Course Practical Details

Name: Warehousing
Level: Master of Science
Faculty: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences (BMS)
Module: 202400647 (see on Osiris)
Credits (ECTS): 5

Teaching Team

Lecturers

Aims

This course aims to introduce the fundamental concepts and techniques for designing, managing, and operating contemporary warehouses.

Intended Learning Outcomes

After successful completion of the course, the student is able to:

  1. Explain the role of warehousing in supply chains and identify warehouse types, functions, and operations.
  2. Discuss major planning, design, management, and control decisions in contemporary warehouses.
  3. Discuss storage and material handling objectives, principles, and technology.
  4. Discuss emerging warehousing challenges, trends, and innovations.
  5. Implement quantitative methods to optimize distribution networks and warehouses’ design, management, and operations.
  6. Analyze relevant data and evaluate performance metrics to support decision-making in a warehousing environment.
  7. Synthesize and critically evaluate relevant warehousing research and literature to inform best practices.

Requirements

This course is open to all engineering students, provided you are familiar with elementary computer programming (If-then-else statements, for/while loops, local/global variables, functions, and procedures).

IEM students are expected to have followed (or take in parallel) Operations Research 1: Deterministic Optimization and Heuristics (201800003).

Study Load (ECTS)

The Warehousing course has a total study load of 5 ECTS1 (140h). Table 1 shows the estimated study load per activity.

Table 1: Warehousing course study load.
Activity Number Duration (h) Workload (h)
Lectures 8 2 16
Guest Lectures 3 1 3
Tutorials 8 2 16
Assignment 1 1 20 20
Assignments (2–4) 3 10 30
Peer Feedback, assignment correction and model answers 2 2 4
Peer Feedback, formative review and peer critique 2 2 4
Weekly self-study 9 3 27
Exam preparation 1 16 16
Final Exam 1 3 3
Total 140

Lectures

In the following, you find a brief overview of the lecture topics. Detailed lecture slides and additional materials will be provided during the course.

  • Lecture 1. Syllabus, introduction to warehousing, overview of warehousing graduation projects at UT.
  • Lecture 2. Warehouse performance evaluation, key metrics, costs and tradeoffs.
  • Lecture 3. Distribution network design tradeoffs, warehouse location models.
  • Guest Lecture 1. Bolk Business Improvement (Warehouse End-to-End Project).
  • Lecture 4. Inventory management fundamentals, storage systems, storage policies, storage location allocation problem (SLAP).
  • Lecture 5. Space requirement planning, storage space allocation optimization.
  • Lecture 6. Layout design decisions, relationship charts, layout optimization.
  • Guest Lecture 2. Vanderlande (Warehouse Automation Solutions).
  • Lecture 7. Introduction to order-picking systems.
  • Guest Lecture 3. Automated Picking (Prof. Dr. Lin Xie)
  • Lecture 8. Order-picking strategies, routing, order batching, zoning, travel time models.

Schedule

The following is an overview of the weekly schedule. For up-to-date information, please refer to the official TimeEdit schedule.

  1. Week 36 (Introduction, Performance Evaluation)

    • Syllabus and course introduction; Warehousing at UT.
    • Warehouse performance evaluation, costs, and tradeoffs.
    • AS1 Activity Profiling [Start].
    • AS1 [Q&A].

  2. Week 37 (Distribution Network Design | 🎤)

    • Distribution network design and the warehouse location problem.
    • [Guest Lecture] BOLK Business Improvement.
    • AS1 [Q&A].

  3. Week 38 (Storage Optimization)

    • AS1 [Feedback].
    • Slotting policies (Storage Location Assignment Problem).
    • Storage policies.
    • AS2 Storage [Start].
    • AS2 [Q&A].

  4. Week 39 (Storage Optimization)

    • AS2 [Q&A].
    • Storage layout and space allocation (mathematical model).
    • Inventory Management Basics (certain and uncertain conditions): safety stock, reorder logic, EOQ (Self-study material).
    • AS2 [Q&A].

  5. Week 40 (Layout Design)

    • Layout design optimization (mathematical model).
    • AS3 Layout [Start].
    • AS3 [Q&A].

  6. Week 41 (Order Picking | 🎤)

    • AS3 [Q&A].
    • Order picking: system archetypes, travel-time models, routing algorithms, order batching.
    • [Guest Lecture] Vanderlande.

  7. Week 42 (Order Picking | 🎤)

    • AS4 Order Picking [Start].
    • [Guest Lecture] Lin Xie.
    • AS4 [Q&A].

  8. Week 43

    • Course wrap-up (warehouse automation, future trends, etc.) and review.
    • AS4 [Q&A].

  9. Week 44 (Exam - MCQ - 3h)

  10. Week 46 (Exam Inspection)

  11. Week 48 (Exam Resit - MCQ - 3h)

Assessment

The assessment consists of two main activities:

  • GA: Group assignments (50%)
  • FE: Final exam (50%)

To succeed in the course, you need to pass the exam (more than 60% of the score) and the total grade (i.e., the sum of all activities’ grades) has to be higher than the passing grade, that is, \(((GA + FE)/100)*9+1 \geq 5.5\).

Group assignments (50%)

There are four group assignments (2 students):

  • Assignment 1 (20%) Activity Profiling
  • Assignment 2 (10%) Storage Allocation
  • Assignment 3 (10%) Layout Design
  • Assignment 4 (10%) Order Picking

Assignments aim at exercising the quantitative nature of the course main modules. Table 1 shows the assignments’ estimated workload.

The tutorials will be focused primarily on providing assistance to solve assignments’ questions.

Final exam (50%)

The final exam covers the whole content of the course. It consists of a closed-book exam featuring multiple-choice questions.

Peer Review

Peer review helps students learn faster and more deeply by studying how classmates solved the same problem, which reveals alternative strategies and common pitfalls. Additionally, the rubric guides you to evaluate content while learning the best practices behind strong solutions.

To succeed in this course, peer review is required. You earn assignment points only after completing your peer reviews on time. Two reviews give full credit. One review gives half credit. Zero reviews give zero.

Timeline (Happy Path)

  1. D1: Teacher releases the assignment in class with directions.
  2. Students ask questions in tutorials and after lectures.
  3. D2: Students submit before the deadline.
  4. D3: Teacher releases a recorded correction and the rubric.
  5. D10: Within one week after D3, each student completes 2 peer reviews in Canvas.
  6. Teacher verifies completion and releases points.
  7. Each submission receives a grade consisting of the average of at least 3 peer reviews. The teacher assigns extra reviewers if needed.

Guardrails

  • If you do not complete your assigned reviews, you do not gain full points.
  • Each student is assigned 2 reviews. Scoring is proportional: 2 reviews equals full points, 1 review equals half points, 0 reviews equals 0 points.
  • If a submission has fewer than 3 received reviews by D10, the teacher assigns additional reviewers or provides an instructor review to reach three.
  • Repair assignments are capped at 5.5. The teacher grades repaired assignments.
  • The teacher will randomly audit reviews for fairness.
  • Students can submit concerns or disputes to the teacher within 72 hours of receiving reviews, with specific references to rubric rows.

Materials

The course content comprises a selection of papers and textbooks. From these, we have curated the essential topics for your study. All materials will be provided via Canvas. You do not need to purchase any of them.

If you wish to read ahead, the following books may be helpful:

  • John J. Bartholdi, & Steven T. Hackman. (2019). Warehouse & Distribution Science. (http://www.warehouse-science.com/).
  • Richards, G. (2021). Warehouse management: The definitive guide to improving efficiency and minimizing costs in the modern warehouse (Fourth edition). Kogan Page.
  • Heragu, S. S. (2022). Facilities design (Fifth edition). CRC Press.
  • Tompkins, J. A. (2010). Facilities planning (4th ed). J. Wiley.
  • Ross, D. F. (2015). Distribution Planning and Control: Managing in the Era of Supply Chain Management. Springer US.
  • Zijm, H., Klumpp, M., Regattieri, A., & Heragu, S. (Eds.). (2019). Operations, Logistics and Supply Chain Management. Springer International Publishing.
  • Coyle, J. J., Langley, C. J., Novack, R. A., & Gibson, B. J. (2020). Supply chain management: A logistics perspective (11th edition). Cengage.
  • Manzini, R. (Ed.). (2012). Warehousing in the Global Supply Chain. Springer London.
  • Frazelle, E. (2016). World-class warehousing and material handling (Second Edition). McGraw-Hill Education.

Content Outline

Introduction

  • History of warehouses
  • Role of warehouses in supply chains
  • Warehouse functions
  • Warehouse classification and types
  • Warehouse management systems (WMSs)
  • Warehousing strategic, tactical, and operational planning decisions

Distribution Network Design

  • Distribution tradeoffs
    • Ownership vs. Outsourcing (third-party logistics)
    • Centralized vs. decentralized
    • Number of facilities
  • Facility location
    • Taxonomy of discrete location models (Daskin)
    • Median-based model formulation
    • Covering-based models’ formulations and heuristic solutions

Warehouse Performance Evaluation

  • Costs and trade-offs
  • Performance metrics
  • Activity profiling

Warehouse Design

  • Space requirement planning
  • Facility layout problem
    • Quantitative/qualitative department relationship charts
    • Systematic layout procedure (SLP)
    • Mathematical formulation
  • Unit-load warehouse layout
    • Aisle width optimization
    • Lane depth optimization

Warehouse Operation

  • Receiving and put-away
    • Cross-docking
  • Storage
    • Inventory management
      • Safety stock and reorder levels
      • Economic order quantities (EOQs)
    • Pallet storage and handling systems
    • Zoning
    • SKU-department assignment
      • Fast-pick area design (fluid model)
    • Storage location assignment (slotting)
      • Storage policies (dedicated, random, class-based, etc.)
      • Cube-per-order index (COI)
  • Order-picking
    • Order-picking systems
      • Case vs. broken-case picking systems
      • Robotized and automated systems (AGVs, RMF, AS/R)
    • Order picking schemes
      • Pick from primary (Batching, Zoning)
      • Pick from storage
    • Routing
      • Travelling salesman problem (TSP)
      • Routing in automated storage and retrieval (AS/R) systems
        • Travel time calculation (Chebyshev metric)
      • Routing in conventional warehouses
        • Ratliff & Rosenthal algorithm
        • Distance approximations for routing manual pickers (Hall algorithm)
  • Replenishment and shipping
  • Support processes
    • Inventory counting
    • Value-adding services
    • Reverse logistics

Warehouse Challenges, Trends, and Innovations

  • External change drivers
  • The warehouse and the environment
  • The warehouse of the future
    • Robotized and automated warehouses
    • Physical internet

Academic Integrity

We remind you that adhering to UT’s Code of Ethics during your studies is essential. To ensure you are fully informed about the code, we invite you to review it carefully by following this link: https://www.utwente.nl/en/organisation/about/integrity/codes-of-conduct/#other-codes-of-conduct.

Please be aware that we have a zero-tolerance policy towards cheating and plagiarism. Using someone else’s ideas, words, or data without proper acknowledgment is strictly prohibited and considered cheating. Therefore, all the work you submit must be entirely original and expressed in your own words. If you utilize any external resources, please make sure to mention them explicitly.

Policy on Generative AI

Following UT’s examination board, we encourage using ChatGPT and other Generative AI as the writing equivalent to a calculator to:

  • “get the ball rolling” on writing assignments;
  • get out of writer’s block;
  • write an outline;
  • improve the tone and language of an assignment.

Communication

We will use the following channels for communication:

  • Canvas: Announcements, grades, and discussions (content, questions).
    • Canvas Discussions:
      • Ask questions, share resources, discuss topics.
      • Answers by fellow students, TAs, and lecturer.
    • Email: For private matters.
    • Office Hours: Before/after class, or by appointment.
  • Feedback: Always welcome! The earlier, the better.

Students should expect a response to their communications within two business days.

  1. ECTS: European Credit Transfer System. One ECTS is equal to 28 hours of study.↩︎