Date of Graduation

12-2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Business Administration (PhD)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Supply Chain Management

Advisor/Mentor

Ozment, John

Committee Member

Waller, Matthew A.

Second Committee Member

Esper, Terry L.

Keywords

Resource Management; Theory of Constraints; Warehouse

Abstract

The warehousing industry is extremely important to businesses and the economy as a whole, and while there is a great deal of literature exploring individual operations within warehouses, such as warehouse layout and design, order picking, etc., there is very little literature exploring warehouse operations from a systems approach.

This study uses the Theory of Constraints (TOC) to develop a focused resource management approach to increasing warehouse capacity and throughput, and thus overall warehouse performance, in an environment of limited warehouse resources. While TOC was originally developed for reducing operational bottlenecks in manufacturing, it has allowed companies in other industries, such as banking, health care, and the military, to save millions of dollars. However, the use of TOC has been limited to case studies and individual situations, which typically are not generalizable. Since the basic steps of TOC are iterative in nature and were not designed for survey research, modifications to the original theory are necessary in order to provide insight into industry-wide problems.

This study further develops TOC's logistics paradigm and modifies it for use with survey data, which was collected from a sample of warehouse managers. Additionally, it provides a process for identifying potentially constrained key warehouse resources, which served as a foundation of this study. The findings of the study confirm that TOC's methods of focused resource capacity management and goods flow scheduling coordination with supply chain partners can be an important approach for warehouse managers to use in overcoming resource capacity constraints to increase warehouse performance.

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