Offsetting inventory replenishment cycles to minimize storage space

In a recent paper, Murthy, Benton and Rubin (2003) discussed the problem of offsetting inventory replenishment cycles of several items in order to minimize the maximum required storage space. They analyzed the case where replenishment cycles are given integer multiples of a basic period and proposed a heuristic to solve the problem. While they provided a good analysis of the considered problem, the proposed heuristic produces less interesting results. In the following, a simpler, more efficient and easier to implant heuristic is proposed. Numerical results are provided to prove its superiority.