Indicadores de desempenho e determinantes de custos: um estudo em um centro de distribuição atacadista

Abstract

Organizations have faced several challenges caused by globalization and heightened by the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic. The e-commerce has grown in recent years and, although many companies have already adapted to sales on digital platforms, others have had to adapt to this new reality. As a result, customer demands have also increased and to attend them, warehouses can facilitate and optimize the flow of goods. Due to changes in consumer habits, the complexity of warehouse operations has increased, making the planning of their activities even more relevant for organizations to achieve a competitive advantage. To minimize the problems inherent to warehouses in general, tools such as performance evaluation can be used combined with understanding the causes that lead to the occurrence of costs. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the relationship between performance indicators and cost drivers of a wholesale warehouse. An applied, qualitative, descriptive research and a case study were carried out in a small traditional wholesale company, located in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Information was collected through a multi-method approach, which included conducting focus groups, participant observations, literature review, interviews with the company manager and documentary research. Thus, the four main operations of the warehouse, namely receiving, storage, picking and shipping, were mapped to enable the understanding of the functioning of the organization as a whole and identify problems in the performance of the activities involved in each operation. A list of 82 performance indicators categorized into five dimensions was drawn up from the literature and, of these, 65 indicators were considered applicable to the warehouse in study. The analysis of the warehouse’s cost drivers showed that the scale, institutional factors, suppliers diversity, scope, technology and verticalization involve strategic choices that have positive impacts on warehouse’s costs. The executional cost drivers highlighted the warehouse’s ability to execute its operations efficiently and it was possible to observe that the design has an influence on other factors, such as time and capacity utilization. By identifying the factors that determine warehouse’s costs, it is possible to analyze their effects on organizational performance using performance indicators, not only about costs, but also productivity, quality, time and flexibility. Thus, performance evaluation can provide insights into the impacts of cost drivers on the efficiency of the warehouse’s operations and contribute to decision-making to be directed towards the efficiency of its processes and costs reduction.