Modelling on service capability maturity and resource configuration for public warehouse product service systems

Abstract

The concept of service was quick to arise and has taken the world by storm in the past decade. It has gradually redefined the way warehouses are operated and has nurtured the emergence of a new kind of warehouse, namely the public warehouse (PW). Against this backdrop, a warehouse product service system (wPSS) based on the PW is established in this paper. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the service capability and optimise the resource configuration of a PW, a wPSS service capability maturity model (wPSS–SCMM) based on the analytical target cascading (ATC) algorithm is put forward. Firstly, the generation of wPSS service capability is clarified and the framework of wPSS–SCMM is proposed. After disassembling the wPSS service capability into a tree structure, its four main sub-capabilities, namely storage service capability, transportation service capability, cost control capability and time control capability, are modelled and quantised, respectively. Then the results of the four sub-capabilities are adopted in the ATC algorithm to search for the maximal service capability maturity and the optimal resource configuration solution. Finally, a numerical example of a PW with eight customers in an industrial park is analysed to demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of the proposed new approach. This research is expected to provide guidance for both investors who want to build a PW and managers who want to continuously improve an existing one.

Keywords:

• public warehouse
• wPSS
• service capability
• maturity
• analytical target cascading

Acknowledgments

The research work presented in this paper is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under both grant number 71071125 and grant number 50875204. The authors hereby thank NSFC for this financial aid.