Gerardo Toraldo

Title	A simple linear model for the optimal management strategy in a food warehouse.
Abstract	Stores represent a basic area of the productive and distributive cycle. The wholesaler, through the distribution connects the producer with the retailer, and therefore plays a fundamental role in the marketing system. Each warehouse has mainly to achieve three goals: 1) high reliability, i.e. the capacity to meet the day by day market demand keeping high standard quality in the service; 2) high flexibility, i.e. the capacity to meet variations in customer demand and to meet unexpected requests; 3) high efficiency, i.e. the capacity to keep the management and purchasing costs as low as possible. In a food warehouse, a special care must be taken in a careful planning and management of the stokes, because foods are shortly perishable goods. An optimal ‘stokes management’ must allow to decide ‘when’ and ‘how much’ the warehouse is supposed to buy in order to satisfy the retailer requests; it strongly needs an effective inventory management. Several codes exist for the inventory management that allow to keep under control the whole information flux concerning the organisation and the work in a food warehouse. Nevertheless, to achieve its full effectiveness, a management strategy strongly requires a proper purchasing strategy, which allow not to run out of products and, at the same time, not to keep foodstuff for too long in the store. We propose a simple mathematical model for the analysis, planning and implementation of an optimal purchasing strategy in a food warehouse,, both in terms of customer satisfaction and costs, based on a linear model which is easy to use, flexible and able to manage a large amount of items. Our analysis’ results show that the resulting strategy is able to keep an high quality level of the service, through a very careful and well balanced purchasing plans, in which the quality constraints only slightly affect the overall management costs. Our analysis, in particular shows how even a small store can be used to manage a quite large distribution system, provided a careful strategy is adopted. That seems to be especially interesting for the distribution systems in downtown areas, where it can be very hard having the availability of large store.
Authors	Silvana Cavella, Tiziana De Rosa, Giannino Francesco, Marina Marino, Paolo Masi, Gerardo Toraldo
Institution	Dipartimento di Ingegneria Agraria e Agronomia del Territorio, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II