Flexsim was recently used to model warehouse operations at the US Army Medical Material Center, Europe (USAMMCE). USAMMCE is responsible for distributing medical supplies and equipment to military installations all across Europe and the Middle-East. The main warehouse is currently installing new racks and introducing new equipment. The model was intended to show how many workers would be needed to complete a day’s work in the correct amount of time, given the new rack layout and new procedures and rules that would be put in place.

The model used historical data from the warehouse stored in a Microsoft Access database. At the start of each simulated day, the model read data for orders that needed to be filled that day and data about orders that were received that day. Information about operations in the warehouse, such as the number of available pickers and the times required to pick an order were read from a Microsoft Excel workbook. This allowed the user to easily change model parameters and perform experiments, all using the same data from the database.

The model used three-dimensional graphics to display the locations of pickers and racks, in order to give the user a good idea of points of congestion in the model, as well as simply letting them see where people would be at any given time during the day. Key statistics were also kept and updated during the day and were displayed on the screen. These statistics included the number of man-hours worked in the current day, the number of hours that certain equipment had been in use, and what time events occurred. These statistics were used to determine the optimal number of workers in the warehouse for several different scenarios defined by the Access database and the Excel spreadsheet.