Cotton Warehousing Efficiencies

The National Cotton Council’s Vision 21 Cotton Flow Study sought to identify cotton flow strategies, systems and practices that the U.S. cotton industry may employ to lower costs or improve returns while meeting the demands of moving cotton into export markets and simultaneously servicing the domestic market.  This project uses discrete event simulation to model the operations of a typical cotton warehouse and evaluate potential improvements in cotton flow that may be realized by implementing a 4-bale marketing plan or incentivizing use of Cotton Incorporated’s MillNET for Merchants® software.  Time and motion data has been collected from multiple warehouses to support the simulation, which provides the foundation to evaluate differences in time, efficiency, and cost of implementing innovative bale selection techniques.