Towards Zero-Warehousing Smart Manufacturing from Zero-Inventory Just-In-Time production

Over the past half-century, manufacturers have strived to achieve “Zero Inventory (ZI)” manufacturing, which puts the burden on suppliers to build their warehouses nearby production lines to meet the strict time delivery requirements of ZI production. Considerable improvements in manufacturing processes have been made. However, this practice in the meanwhile brings excessive warehousing operations along the supply chain. Recently, massive up-front investment has been made by some larger manufacturers for industrial 4.0 and warehouse automation to facilitate warehousing operations, such as put away and picking. However, warehouse operation activities enhanced by automation are still non-value-adding and current practice of redundant handling process implies continuous cost increase with the demand expanding. Therefore, it is of significance to simplify the corresponding operations as much as possible. This paper makes a comprehensive introduction to a new manufacturing paradigm named Zero-Warehousing Smart Manufacturing (ZWSM) from the concept, practices, principles, and core technologies. ZWSM basically aims to avoid traditional non-value-adding warehousing operations such as put away and order picking, as well as to reduce the warehousing space for operations to the minimum. First, prototype layout and basic practices under ZWSM are proposed. Second, synchronization, unitization and uncertainty hedging, which are the key principles to achieve the ZWSM, are explicitly introduced. Third, A Zero-Warehousing Smart Manufacturing Platform (ZWSMP) is developed with the Internet of Things (IoT) enabled infrastructures. Corresponding logistics services are presented to provide information visibility and achieve operations improvement. A case study of the Hong Kong prefabrication construction project is used to demonstrate the materials delivery process among different supply chain partners to provide a basis for zero-warehousing achievement.