ERGONOMIC LOT SIZING: A NEW INTEGRATED PROCEDURE TOWARDS A SUSTAINABLE INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

Worldwide production systems are asking for new procedures and tools towards a Responsible Inventory Management, both in theory and in practice. Research in the Lot Sizing area is fundamentally driven by the first basic model (developed by Harris in 1913) and by a large set of succeeding incremental steps, developed in order to better reflect real industrial problems and constraints. Only in the last three years environmental and social aspects have been progressively introduced in the Lot Sizing international theory in order to face the increasing concern in the modern society towards the “Sustainability” issue. Anyway, the social impact of EOQ/EPQ policies is currently not enough investigated and often discussed only by a descriptive approach. In the light of these considerations, in this work the social impact of inventory policies and lot sizing procedures in terms of “Ergonomics” is discussed and measured. A new easy-to-use procedure of “Ergonomic Lot Sizing” is introduced, which is useful to be applied in the industrial setting when EOQ/EPQ policies are the determinants of the manual handling/lifting activities performed