“Excellent warehousing book spans the tough spectrum of technology, inventory, and worker motivation. Thought provoking!"

Integral Warehouse Management is 252 pages of useful and valuable warehousing perspectives. The author clearly indicates how to move from a “reactive” warehouse operation into the ideal “collaborative” cost savings operations. This is an excellent book for all warehouse operations, integrators, and employees of WMS vendors. It explains the basics well and then rapidly educates one in intermediate and advance issues facing DC managers today.

In addition, Jeroen van den Berg shares many key insights on how to warehouse better. For example of one of these insights – Jeroen boldly discusses task priority logic. An excerpt from the book:

“WMS’s typically represent the urgency by a priority number. Some WMS’s have fixed priorities, e.g., a replenishment task is always more urgent than a pick task. Other WMS’s are able to assign an initial priority to a task and then automatically increase its priority with the course of time. We believe that priorities should relate to the deadlines rather than the start times. Hence, users should be creative and attempt to configure the priority numbers in the WMS so that they are linked to the deadlines.”

Bravo! Task priority values should be directly tied to the deadline and not its task age! Very good point. He then charts time-based aging versus deadline-based effectiveness (see pages 171 thru 173).

Besides, defining the basics in detail, the author goes into much appreciated detail on advanced warehousing topics. These include bin locator logic, service level agreements, inventory costing models, labor management systems, dashboards, key performance indicators, workload planning, workload fluctuation, discontinuities in warehousing operations, value added services, procurement, VMI, and much more! An innovative visual wave monitoring is displayed and explained in detail.

Excellent book! It’s a book that requires your full attention over a few days of time.

Written by Philip Obal, November 2007, President of IDII. Research & Management Consulting Firm