Study On Layout And Process Design For The Northern Distribution Centre Of A Group

In the past decade, the economy of China is growing very fast. The consuming ability of Chinese enhanced a lot. As the enterprise manufacturing products to end consumers, footwear and apparel enterprises have hundreds of thousands of goods are produced from factories and shipped to consumers. This is a huge and very complex process, which takes big challenges to the logistic system of those enterprises. Distribution centre is one of the major factors of the logistic system, the layout planning and working process design of which have significant affection to the performance and profit of the entire logistic system. Usually, the distribution centre of footwear and apparel enterprises are facing difficulties like tremendous business volume, tight delivery schedule, order requirement dispersed among thousands of SKU’s and etc. Recently, the E-commerce is more and more popular. The order requirement of E-commerce has bigger dispersion and those orders need to be delivered to end consumers directly. The clients of E-commerce have higher expectation for the on time delivery and may cancel orders at any time. All these characteristics of E-commerce take new requirements to distribution centres. A large distribution centre is required to support omni-channels at the same time. As a worldwide leading producer of sports footwear and apparel, with the fast increasing business, A group company is planning to build a northern distribution centre in Beijing-Tianjin area of North China. This article is studying the layout planning and working process design for the northern distribution centre.Currently, A group company only have one distribution centre in Yangtze River delta area of East China, to support the entire business of China mainland, but excluding E-commerce business. Along with the rapid growing business, the capability of the current distribution centre is accessing the ceiling. So A group company is planning to construct a new large distribution centre in Beijing-Tianjin area of North China, mainly supporting the business of northern China. The required capability is to handle 40% business of China mainland, including all the E-commerce business. Based on the overseas and domestic theory about distribution centre design, and distribution centre instances, through the detail analysis against China business data and qualitative/quantitative comparison among multiple strategies, this article provides solution about layout planning and working process design for the omni-channel business of this distribution centre.Based on this design and other distribution centre instances, this article will summarize the principles and guidelines of layout planning and working process design for large distribution centre.