Prioritizing warehouse performance measures in contemporary supply chains

Due to the importance of efficiency and responsiveness measures rather than just efficiency measures, this research recognizes both measures when considering overall performance of warehouse operations. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to prioritize overall performance measures associated with warehouse operations in manufacturing, third-party logistics service provider and retail industry supply chains.

The study uses an integrated approach that involves the Q-sort method to group measures into four categories. Fuzzy analytical hierarchy process was then used to prioritize individual performance measures within each category and integer liner programming model was used to validate prioritized categories, using the judgment of multiple decision makers across three industries.

The result shows that the financial category is a dominating performance category in managing warehouse operations across all three industries selected. Within the financial category, cost of insurance accounted for 25 percent of total weight of the category, and is considered to be a powerful measure. The financial category is verified by multiple decision makers across three industries, as the most important performance category.

As part of adopting the proposed methodology in practice, it needs to be guided by overall methodology appropriate for industry-specific contexts.

Key novel aspects of this study are to categorize warehouse operations measures and analyze their perspectives in different industries, understand dominant categories of warehouse operations measures in the contemporary supply chain and finally to explore to what extent current practices lead to achieving efficiency and responsiveness in the selected industries.