A New Sustainable Warehouse Management Approach for Workforce and Activities Scheduling

Abstract

Sustainable engineering is very important for logistics systems. Nowadays, sustainable warehouse management is a key factor in market success. Workforce fluctuation and inverting the number of customers’ demands make a lot of problems in distribution warehouses. This study addresses a sustainable approach for the workforce scheduling problem recognized in a real distribution warehouse. The problem arises from the high variability of demand for workers over one workday, which causes workforce surplus in some periods of the workday and shortages in others. Engineering managers of the distribution warehouse already use different full-time and part-time shifts, and schedule workers on different activities, but they still have significant workforce surpluses or shortages in some periods. This study proposes the scheduling of activities’ execution together with workers to face that variability and decrease the cost of the workforce. This idea comes from the fact that some activities in a distribution warehouse can be done in a specific time period after the need for them occurs. In this way, the variability of demand for workers can be decreased, and a lower workforce cost may be ensured. Based on this idea, the entire problem is modeled as integer linear programming. The real example of the problem is solved, and the proposed model is tested on randomly generated instances of the problem in Python by means of the PuLP linear programming package. The results indicate different positive effects in the manner of sustainable warehouse management: lower workforce costs, time savings, better utilization of all types of resources and equipment, increased employee satisfaction, and so on. For even 61% of instances of the introduced problem, the obtained cost of the workforce is lower by more than 20% if activities’ executions are scheduled together with employees.

The significance of warehouse management in supply chain: An ISM approach

“…According to studies, a lack of planning when determining actual utilizable space causes major setbacks in the warehouse's economic stability (Rebelo et al, 2021). Along with this, a stable workforce schedule increases the overall effectiveness of all warehouse activities (Popović et al, 2021). The 5M (Man, Method, Material, Machine, and Measurement) are the most common sources of errors, and they require continuous maintenance (Hajej et al, 2021).…”

Accelerating the Adoption of Energy Efficiency and Renewables in Warehouses and Distribution Centers

“…Through the improvements they proposed, warehouse managers can make informed decisions to optimize the effectiveness of order picking, reducing related energy consumption and improving workforce utilization. Recently, Popovic et al [34] proposed an innovative approach to optimize operations in warehouses, scheduling activities' execution together with workforce. Through their framework, it is possible to reduce the use of workforce, and therefore its cost (decreased by 20%), with better resource utilization that also drives social, economic, and environmental sustainability benefits.…”

Intelligent Warehouse Picking Improvement Model for e-Logistics Warehouse Using Single Picker Routing Problem and Wave Picking

“…2) Scheduling: Scheduling is used to carry out the process of assigning a resource to carry out the process to achieve a certain goal [31], [32]. Single Picker Routing Problem is closely related to scheduling, especially to scheduling resources for picking.…”