When goods are delivered to supermarkets, not all of them immediately go on the shelves. Products often have to be stored in the store's back warehouse first, which incurs high costs. Retail companies are working on strategies to solve this problem. The Chair of Supply Chain Management & Operations at the KU's Ingolstadt School of Management (WFI) is now researching how effective these are in cooperation with Ingolstadt University of Applied Sciences (THI) and the drug store retailer 'dm-drogerie markt'.
Prof. Dr. Heinrich Kuhn, holder of the Chair of Supply Chain Management & Operations at the KU, is supervising the project in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Michael Sternbeck from the THI: "For a retail company with several thousand stores, this process has an enormous impact on overall logistics costs", says Professor Kuhn. This is why the project is highly relevant in practice, as Dr. Sandra Zajac, research assistant at his Chair, emphasizes: "Shelf space planning is an important topic in supermarkets. Space is limited; what cannot be accommodated is the so-called backpack, which is taken to the back warehouse and incurs additional costs."
According to Professor Kuhn, newly arrived goods are traditionally positioned in front of the shelves on the sales floor and then placed on the shelves – with the aim of accommodating as many items as possible directly and keeping the "backpack quantities" to a minimum. "Otherwise, these products have to be taken to the store warehouse and, when shelf space becomes available again due to sales, transported from the back warehouse to the shelves on the sales floor", explains Kuhn.
Additional costs arising from this are enormous: "It is assumed that re-stocking the goods with temporary storage in the store's background warehouse incurs up to five times higher costs than direct stocking when the goods are delivered." Alternative concepts could be used to try and avoid this re-stocking. "This involves adjusting delivery cycles, changing packaging units or implementing ad-hoc measures at short notice. These measures are associated with additional costs and must be weighed against the cost of the backpack", says Kuhn. As part of the current research project, the cooperation partners want to find out to what extent, for which product category and under which conditions the respective concepts are suitable for implementation. "Long-, medium- and short-term decision support systems will then be designed and implemented that incorporate the respective concepts in the course of assortment, packaging and shelf space planning as well as in merchandise replenishment."
In an initial project, the researchers and a group of students collected data on five selected product categories, analyzed the strategy applied in each case and developed an initial operational optimization model. For student Andreas Sabaschta, taking part in the project study program was a great opportunity: "I really wanted to be involved in analyses that are actually relevant in a practical context." Master's student Caroline Wiesner also found it enriching to be actively involved in research: "I'm writing my Master's thesis on the subject of 'store logistics'. The topic will still be relevant in the future and the theory can be linked very well with practice."
For Prof. Sternbeck (THI), this collaboration between practice partners, researchers and students is what sets the project apart: "Different actors participate cooperatively in order to jointly achieve an improvement that increases the efficiency of entire retail supply chains."
In its research projects, the Chair of Supply Chain Management & Operations focuses on the development of decision support systems for the design and operation of supply and value chains in industry, trade and services. In the past, together with students, doctoral candidates, post-docs and scientific colleagues, numerous research projects have already been successfully analyzed, modeled and solved in collaboration with well-known companies and subsequently published in international journals. Prof. Dr. Heinrich Kuhn has now been honored by the WFI for these achievements at the Chair of Supply Chain Management & Operations.
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![[Translate to Englisch:] dm Drogerie](/fileadmin/_processed_/7/e/csm_dm-Europapark_Silke_Walz4_d16ef5e6cd.jpg)
