This work fosters the notion that strategic characteristics of warehouse facilities, such as geographical location and size, are more important factors for reducing maintenance costs and for supporting the logistical business performance rather than design decisions on building details and minor actions aimed at cutting FM costs.
It is stated that the ideal distribution warehouse must be located in an efficient region
to assure low BMC.
Also, the perfect facility must have a correct level of exploitation to reduce the DMC.
In particular, the ratio between the UFA and the volume of transiting freight must be sized appropriately to avoid either under or overutilization of the warehouse.
However, this study poses some limitations. First, it draws implications for the geographical area that has been considered and any extrapolation for general use in similar contexts out of Italy might require local country data and appropriate regional clustering.
Second, because traffic volumes are dynamic and change over time, it may be difficult for a logistics company to size warehouses based on unsteady projected freight volumes.
Therefore, based on both the difficulty of estimating future market demand and the relevance of the age of the building in determining BMCs, it becomes clear that frequently relocating warehouses to meet the changing needs of freight volume and to use young building facilities is a valuable management practice. In this sense, leasing warehouse facilities proves to be a more effective strategy to manage maintenance cost than real property.
Of course, this study fails to consider other operational requirements in the process of shaping the appropriate size and location of warehouse facilities. Further research is currently developing these additional operational issues to look for the most appropriate factors of cost-efficiency in warehouse buildings.
References
Ahuja, I.P.S. and Khamba, J.S. (2008), “Strategies and succes