精實管理於食材物流業的應用－模組化定時型雙箱法的實踐

Abstract

台灣餐飲業近年蓬勃發展，各樣食材也隨之出現，但食安問題接連爆發，業者對食安的要求更加嚴格，因而強調可以快速提供各項營運需求品且保證商品衛生的食材物流業營業量也同步上揚；此情況下，食材物流業為能滿足各種客戶一次購足需求品，銷售項目逐步增加，因而用來儲存備貨以快速提供客戶需求的物流中心出現倉容不足的窘境。精實管理的終極目標是零庫存，庫存低才能讓營運更靈活與多元，故業者要持續在降低庫存同時能滿足客戶上努力。文獻中精實管理用於食材物流業並不多見，而本研究擷取精實管理的平準化概念建立較精準的食材倉管策略，搭配傳統“定容”雙箱法，在考量業者運作特性後，採用精實生產的共模概念，提出“模組化定時”雙箱法；定時為訂定接近銷量平準化的合宜雙箱備用天數，以期能達到降低庫存及精確預測需求的目的，接著將雙箱備用天數模組化，採購只發生在每周兩個固定時間，不須每天都要為不足量的商品補貨，因而採購人員也較能專注在提升效率或新商品開發等重要任務。本研究使用移動平均法探求雙箱合宜的備用天數，接著再用整合移動平均自迴歸模型來預測備用天數裡的需求量；本研究提出方法使用台灣某食材物流公司近三年的銷售數據驗證其實務上的可行性。

The catering industry in Taiwan has been flourished in recent years. As a result, a variety of new food ingredients has emerged. Meanwhile, because food safety problems continuously exploded, the catering industry pays more attention to the hygiene of goods which they use. Therefore, the turnovers of these food logistics companies increase as they can quickly provide as many as possible daily necessities of catering industry (one stop shopping service) and, in addition, guarantee the safety of merchandise. However, the increases of turnovers also cause that the numbers of sale items in the food logistics companies increases. Since these companies must stock an amount of merchandise in order to quickly meet the needs of their customers, which makes the warehouse capacities of logistics centers quickly appear insufficient. Inventory is the most important waste in lean management. Food logistics companies can always offer new goods to the customers only as there is room for these new items in the warehouse. Therefore, they need to constantly look for strategies for reducing inventory and meet customer needs. Although, to the best of the author's knowledge, the literature lacks research on the use of lean management to improve food logistics performance, this study modified the tool of lean management to establish a simple operation strategy for the warehouse management of the logistics centers. This study combined the original operation rule of the logistics center and the ＂fixed-capacity＂ two bin system to developed a ＂modularized fixed-term＂ two bin system. The term ＂fixed-term＂ means setting appropriate cycle lengths for the two bin and then the purchasing representatives place orders based on the cycle time of each product. With appropriate cycle lengths they can reduce the inventory and only prepare for near-demand by accurately predicting cycle time requirements. Then, the cycle time of two bins for each product is modularized to only a few lengths. Therefore, the purchasing representatives order at two fixed time points a week, rather than placing orders every day due to out of stock. The purchasing representatives can then focus on inventory management or investigate new merchandise on the other days of a week. The study search for appropriate cycle lengths of two bins for each product using a simple moving average method and, based on the cycle lengths, the autoregressive integrated moving average model is applied to accurately forecast the demand of cycle time. The feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated using three-year sale data from a food logistics company in Taiwan.