 Professor Leon McGinnis and researchers at Georgia Tech's Keck Virtual Factory Laboratory presented revolutionary technology at this year's North American Material Handling Show in Detroit. Their tool, known as iDEAs, is an online benchmarking tool for the performance assessment and benchmarking of warehouse operations.
McGinnis describes the tool as an innovative approach to answering a fundamental question:
"How well is my warehouse performing, and what can I do to improve it?"
"We are exploiting Internet technology to allow warehouse managers to submit their data and receive analysis almost instantly," he said. "Today, we can provide a ‘relative performance assessment' by comparing a given warehouse to the ‘best possible' warehouse constructed from a database of more than 150 other warehouses. In the future, I believe we will be able to determine statistical correlations between particular practices and their impact on relative performance. This will be a major breakthrough in logistics because it will provide a solid, empirical foundation for warehouse design and operational improvement." The Keck Lab has several partners in its mission, including The Progress Group, the Logistics Execution Systems Association, and the Order, Selection, Staging and Storage Council. The latter two organizations are part of the Material Handling Industry of America. The researchers prepared a brochure for the trade show that describes their product. It includes the following information on iDEAs:
What is it?
iDEAs is a system-based assessment of warehouse operations that goes beyond conventional single-factor productivity metrics (picks/hr, cube/line). For a client warehouse, iDEAs evaluates the set of resources used and the operational results achieved by comparing them to a hypothetical "best practices" warehouse constructed from a database of more than 150 actual warehouses. iDEAs computes a "system efficiency score," giving an absolute comparison to the best practice, and a "percentile ranking" that shows how you compare to all the other warehouses in the database.
How does it work?
iDEAs uses a method called data envelopment analysis to compute an optimized "benchmark" warehouse. At the core of the method is a warehouse input-output model. The current version of iDEAs is based on a study by Frazelle and Jackman and uses the resources and operational results developed for their study. Their study captured data for more than fifty warehouses. Since coming online more than a year ago, more than 100 warehouses have been added.
What data do I need?
RESOURCES:
- Inventory of warehouse equipment
- Headcount
- Floor Space
- Number of broken case pick slots
- Number of pallet rock slots
- Square foot floor stacking
RESULTS:
- Total orders shipped (per year)
- Broken case lines shipped
- Full case lines shipped
- Pallet lines shipped
In addition, you will be asked to provide some information about your company and your warehouse. Company information is needed so we can contact you to clarify data, or verify that it represents an actual warehouse. Warehouse information is required in order to do the analysis necessary to identify "markets" of excellent performance.
What does it tell me?
iDEAs calculates two system efficiency scores. The input efficiency score indicates how much resource the best practices warehouse would have used to achieve your level of output. For example, a score of 80 percent indicates the best practice warehouse would need only 80 percent of the resources you used to produce your output. A similar output efficiency score indicates what level of results the best practices warehouse could have achieved with your level of inputs. For example, a score of 125 percent indicates the best practice warehouse could have achieved 125 percent of your output. In addition to the raw efficiency scores, iDEAs provides a percentile score (much like the ACT or SAT) that shows how you compare to all other warehouses in the database.
What do I need to do?
Point your browser at the online version of the tool at: http://www.isye.gatech.edu/ideas. There is no cost to use the benchmarking tool.
What else can it do?
The self-assessment tool can be customized to allow internal benchmarking for focused industry segments. For users with multiple sites, application specific input and output measures can be defined to reflect the specific business and requirements of the user or group of users. A customized version of the tool would be relatively easy to implement but is most effective for a group of several dozen locations. Other possible uses for a different version of the tool include budgeting, planning, and internal benchmarking over time for a single location. This would require a significant development effort. Professor McGinnis' team is happy to discuss potential applications and new version development with those interested.
For more information, contact Professor McGinnis at 404.894.2312 or leon.mcginnis@ isye.gatech.edu. |
