DC Velocity - March 2019

80 DC VELOCITY MARCH 2019 www.dcvelocity.com INBOX CLUTTER IS LONG PAST BEING RECOGNIZED AS a “thing.” For most of us, the daily deluge of incoming messages has made inbox management a near full-time job. Making matters worse is the ratio of e-mails with actual value to the spam, junk, and generally unwanted clutter. For instance, a quick spot check of the 188 new e-mail messages that arrived on a recent morning showed that the “useful-to-junk” ratio was a miserable 37:151. Doing some rounding, that’s (more or less) just one e-mail of value for every five that are junk.

If you’re in the same boat (as you most likely are), your daily routine probably includes one or more cursory scans of your inbox to get rid of the obvious junk so you can concentrate on what’s left. The challenge, of course, is to be sure that in your haste, you don’t purge any e-mails that you want or need to see.

When an e-mail with the subject line “Splash Item” hit our inbox last week, our inclination was to delete it and move on. But then we spotted the sender’s name.

The message came from our longtime friend and noted academic Dr. Kevin Gue, professor of industrial engineering and director of the Logistics and Distribution Institute at the University of Louisville (Ky.).

Having avoided the misstep of hastily hitting
“delete,” we opened the message to read the
following statement: “For only the second time
in my career, I’ve stumbled onto a piece of research I think should
be of immediate interest to almost all warehouse managers.”
A statement like that coming from someone of Gue’s stature
spoke volumes. It was clear there was something in the e-mail we
wanted—and needed—to see.

What we found was a gem of an idea—a simple yet potentially
high-value idea—that Gue and his colleagues had “stumbled
upon.”
The idea is simple: What if you could enter four simple (and
readily available) data points into an online calculator that tells
you how to reconfigure your pallet racks for maximum space
efficiency? In other words, the model would take your data
and develop a “best profile” of pallet slots (or to be precise, slot
heights) for your individual operation, resulting in double-digit
savings in storage space. Sounds too good to be true, right?

Well, it’s not.

In his years of visiting DCs as part of his field work, Gue wrote, he’s found that “almost all pallet [storage racks] use only one, or perhaps two, slot heights, which unavoidably creates waste between the top of the pallet and the beam above it.” Walk through your own DC, and you’ll likely notice the same thing.

“Most unit-load [facilities] have slots of a single
size, presumably the size of the tallest pallet handled
regularly, or perhaps two slots, with a smaller slot to
handle smaller pallets with less waste,” Gue wrote in
the e-mail. “After thinking for
a while, we wondered what size
that second slot [and possibly a
third or even fourth slot] should
be.”
Gue and his colleagues went to
work on the problem, ultimate-
ly spending more than a year
developing and refining their
solution. The result is a wonder-
fully simple, and extraordinarily
useful, online tool that provides
recommendations you can apply
in your own facility right away.

“We show how to determine a profile of slot heights and the number of positions for each height to reduce the wasted space,” he said. “Our research indicates expected storage space savings between 20 and 40 percent—much greater than we anticipated.”

Gue has written a short blog on the project that includes a rundown of the four data points required for the calculation. Titled “Finding Warehouse Space in Unexpected Places,” the blog provides links to a published research paper on the model as well as a link to the free online calculator itself. You can find it at https://kevingue.wordpress.com.