Warehouse performance measurement: a literature review

As the supply chains get more complex, the variety of indicators and tools to measure warehouse performance has also increased. Furthermore, the metrics that are used for performance evaluation are assessed in different manners and hence there is not clear definition for some of these metrics. To address these issues, this literature review focuses on operational warehouse performance measurement, for which the warehouse managers need to carry out periodic analysis. Using the content analysis method, performance indicators are acquired from selected papers and are classified according to time, cost, quality and productivity dimensions. The contributions of this literature review are as follows: we present a synthesis of the literature on operational warehouse performance, we provide the definitions for the performance indicators and a framework to demonstrate their boundaries and, finally, based on the literature analysis, we also provide some discussions on current trends in warehouses and propose future research directions on warehouse performance evaluation.