An economic cost benefit analysis of internal and external warehouses in food retail industry

In today's supermarket world, consumers apart from demanding 'higher and higher quality at lower and lower prices', want more and more product choices. This has put tremendous pressure on supermarkets and their infrastructure. With better information technology, forecasting techniques, planning tools, demand fulfillment and supplier relationships supermarkets can meet the rising demand much better than ever before. But inorder to meet this demand at the lowest price they need to rethink their inbound logistics and re-optimize their warehouses. This has spurred a growth in warehousing outsourcing. The study is concerned with evaluating the cost benefit between the internal and the external warehousing for the food retail industry, while addressing the following issues: 1. Advantages and disadvantages of an internal and external warehouse. 2. Importance of alignment of logistics strategy and corporate strategy. 3. Vendor items which should be outsourced or insourced The study was conducted by evaluating the economic value for fifteen different vendors of a regional supermarket chain with the objective to help the supermarket chain reassess its warehousing strategy.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2003

Author dc:creator

• Mehrotra, Vikas, 1975-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• James M. Masters.

• Engineering Systems Division.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/29534

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/29534