Entwicklung und Anwendung eines Vorgehens zur Entwicklung eines umsetzungsfähigen Warehouse-Management-System-Konzepts für kleine und mittlere Unternehmen

Translated title of the contribution: Development and application of a procedure to engineer an implementable warehouse-management system-concept for small and medium enterprises

Benjamin Kormann

Research output: ThesisMaster's Thesis

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Abstract

The efficient and effective management and automation of warehouses by IT-technologies is a strong growing tendency amongst all kind of business which has been caused and accelerated especially by recent developments such as e-commerce, the internet of thing, steadily growing implementation of virtual networks connecting enterprises and manufacturing companies and globalization itself. One of the main components of said IT-technologies are warehouse management systems which do control, manage and monitor all operational warehouse processes. Additionally, such systems provide and measure data which is used to measure, monitor and analyze operational warehouse measurements. These functionalities are realized by implementing various interfaces to host systems and subordinate systems allowing real time data exchange. Thus information needs of host systems such as ERP- or inventory control systems can be met immediately and a continuous improvement process can be implemented in order to keep an operational optimum and steadily improve operational warehouse processes and the processes can be modified to changing business conditions immediately. In order to implement and operate a warehouse management system it is necessary to capture company specific operational warehouse processes, as these procedures must be mapped as close to reality as possible in the application. By ensuring this fact, it can be guaranteed that the warehouse management system does support and manage operational warehouse processes as efficiently as possible in order to steadily keep and raise operational optimums. Therefore, the application has to be individually configured for every installation which creates significant additional costs while implementing a Warehouse Management System. This fact does raise the overall costs of such application packages which does make a purchase of such packages especially for medium and small enterprises uneconomic even though the overall economic situation does demand such an installation. The goal of this thesis is therefore to establish in a first step the role of warehouse management systems and standardized operational warehouse processes for small and medium enterprises along the supply chain. Afterwards the functionalities of a warehouse management system are being described in detail and the implementation process of such systems is being thoroughly analyzed in order to establish the costliest actions needed to implement a warehouse management system. Based on these result a procedure is developed to design implementable standardized warehouse processes. This procedure is based on software engineering models and especially on requirements engineering principles which are being thoroughly analyzed. The collection of the requirements is done by interviewing potential customer, in this case small and medium enterprises. The results of these interviews is being documented and analyzed. These results are being used to define the functionalities of such a software and standardized operational warehouse processes, which are being implemented in a warehouse management system. The result if this thesis therefore is an implementable description of software functionalities and a set of standardized operational warehouse processes which can be used further as a base to create a requirements specification for a suitable software.
Translated title of the contributionDevelopment and application of a procedure to engineer an implementable warehouse-management system-concept for small and medium enterprises
Original languageGerman
QualificationDipl.-Ing.
Supervisors/Advisors
  • Zsifkovits, Helmut, Supervisor (internal)
  • Altendorfer-Kaiser, Susanne, Co-Supervisor (internal)
  • Mischitz, Christian, Supervisor (external), External person
Award date18 Mar 2016
Publication statusPublished - 2016

Bibliographical note

embargoed until 03-02-2021

Keywords

  • warehouse management
  • software requirements engineering
  • warehouse logistics
  • process design
  • warehouse management system
  • software development

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