Planning of production supermarkets for production supply

Production supermarkets are a system to ensure high-frequency, demand-oriented, in-plant production supply with low lot sizes. The paper presents methods to design and dimension these systems using qualitative design criteria and quantitative approaches based on well-known analytical methods for conventional order picking systems. The methods help to design layout, provision type and path strategy and to derive space consumption and the number of supermarket employees required to fulfill a defined demand.