Zara

Title Warehouse Inventory Management A Case Study in Retail Fashion Industry Company Name Zara International Objective for a warehouse management is fully utilize the space, improved the productivity of operations flow and reduce the inventory carrying cost. From the case of Zara, I found that they arranging the cross-dock rather then typical storage function. Because they have the commitment about the order fulfillment time from warehouse to stores, for examples 24 hours to European countries, 48 hours to American and within 72 hours to Japan. So Zaras warehouse needs to have efficient operations arrangement with the automatic handling equipment to achieve the fast fashion goal. (90 words) 1.1 Functional Design The typical warehouse functions have five main processes receiving, putaway, storage, pick pack and dispatch. If we need to understand and well planning the warehouse design and layout. Primarily we must understanding the industry business strategy, trend and consumer behavior. Nowadays the warehouse functions are not only for storage and also need to provide the added value service to fulfill the business needed. First of all, we need to learn the product nature and understand business intention. For the retail fashion industry, the raw materials suppliers from Fabric Company mainly. The cloths have difference colour, pattern and natural of fabric (wool, cotton, leather etc.), the suppliers must have sufficient raw materials to provide to the industry for further processing. Second, we need to understand the nature of products, for example packaging (cartons, boxes, pallets, hangers etc), size, stock keeping unit (SKU) and stock layout. Third, we need to know the production, work in process for example suppliers order, shipment order, size of markets served, material handling system used, throughput rate, production lead time, aisle requirement etc. If we need to provide the fast and accuracy operations flow, all parties within the supply