An order-picking operations system for managing the batching activities in a warehouse

Abstract

Nowadays, customer orders with high product variety in small quantities are often received and requested for timely delivery. However, the order-picking process is a labour-intensive and costly activity to handle those small orders separately. In such cases, small orders are often grouped into batches so that two or more orders can be served at once to increase the picking efficiency and thus reduce the travel distance. In this paper, an order-picking operations system (OPOS) is proposed to assist the formulation of an order-picking plan and batch-handling sequence. The study integrates a mathematical model and fuzzy logic technique to divide the receiving orders into batches and prioritise the batch-handling sequence for picking, respectively. Through the proposed system, the order-picking process can be managed as batches with common picking locations to minimise the travel distance, and the batch-picking sequence can be determined as well. To demonstrate the use of the system, a case study in a third-party logistics warehouse is presented, and the result shows that both the order-picking activity and labour utilisation can be better organised. IntroductionTo survive in this highly competitive business environment, logistics service providers (LSPs) have changed their strategic goals to achieve shorter order cycle times, lower costs and better customer service. Instead of keeping a large amount of stock for long-term storage, the warehouse of LSPs has explored its functions to handle orders that contain fast-moving items with large product variety (Chow, Choy, Lee, and Lau 2006). Thus, customers are allowed to place the delivery orders based on actual sales demand. Therefore, delivery orders with small quantities of goods are frequently received. Planning of warehouse order-picking activities effectively becomes complex, so that the order can be picked and delivered at a designated time.With the goal to allocate minimum warehouse resources and satisfy customer demands within a short period of time, the idea of order batching becomes important to increase the picking efficiency. The orders are consolidated into batches before the actual picking process, that is, items of two or more orders are grouped in a single picking trip. The picker can then travel and pick the same types of items at once for several orders to increase the efficiency. In general, the total travel time and distance can be reduced by the order-batching strategy if orders with a similar item storage location are handled at the same time (Ho and Tseng 2011). However, the consideration on assigning appropriate amount of labour resources to pick the

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