Electre tri method used to storage location assignment into categories

Abstract

Day after day, the importance of a company having an efficient storage location assignment system increases. Moreover, since products have different warehouse costs and customers' requirements are also different, it is important to sort products in order to adopt strategies for inventory management that are appropriate for each product. However, adopting a policy for each product is not applicable in the real world. Therefore, companies usually categorize products into classes and thereafter adopt specific inventory management policies. Given this situation, this paper puts forward the arguments for adopting a multi-criteria method, Electre TRI, to sort products that both considers criteria relating to the characteristics of a product as to its physical location in the warehouse and the criteria that are important for inventory strategies, such as, for example, the profitability of each unit held in storage. © 2013 Brazilian Operations Research Society.