A Hypothesis of a Lean Warehouse Design for an Italian Textile and Apparel Company

Currently, companies experience a very competitive scenario: innovations, changes in consumer behaviour, competitiveness and dynamic markets put firms in a position to rethink and improve their organization and processes to increase efficiency and performance. Companies, in order to adapt to this context, can gain insight from Lean management. In this work, the principles of Lean thinking were applied to the case of an Italian company operating in the textile and apparel sector in designing a new warehouse functional to its business; the actual constraints given by the structure of the building to be used as a warehouse were respected, but the economic aspect, the costs to be incurred and the detailed quantity of goods that the company intended to store inside were not reported (for privacy reasons). Through typical Lean thinking processes and tools, such as value stream mapping, 5S and kaizen, several benefits can be achieved.