The storage of perishable products: A decision-support tool to manage temperature-sensitive products warehouses

With the growth of customer awareness and regulations in force on quality and safety of perishable products, the handling of environmental conditions experienced by products along the supply chain assumes increasing relevance. The storage temperature is one of the most important drivers in controlling the physicochemical properties of a perishable product throughout the distribution chain. Therefore, a fair strategy for ensuring the quality and safety of products to the final consumer is to monitor the temperature conditions experienced by products during their storage time spent in warehouses, through dedicated location-mapping activities. However, the warehousing literature reveals a lack of methods and tools to lead managers through temperature warehouse mapping. In view of this, this chapter proposes a tool tailored for the calculation and visualization of temperature profiles of each storage location over a given time period. The proposed tool is validated through a multiple case study provided by two third-party logistics (3PL) companies that deal with the storage of biomedical products and beverages, respectively. Then, a support-decision model devoted to the storage assignment problem for a perishable item warehouse is formulated. This model, properly fueled by the proposed tool, can be used to handle operational decisions and the put-away process when stored items can be affected by thermal stresses.