Improving order picking performance utilizing slotting and golden zone storage

Abstract

PurposeWith the current interest in all aspects of supply chain management, the demands on warehousing have changed significantly within the past few years. In an attempt to meet this challenge, warehouses have become more concerned with proper slotting and storage techniques. This paper seeks to evaluate slotting measures and storage assignment strategies in a simulated manual bin‐shelving (low level picker‐to‐part) warehouse in terms of travel distance and the fulfillment time to complete an order.Design/methodology/approachThe approach utilises Monte Carlo simulation of a manual bin‐shelving pick area.FindingsThe results illustrate that popularity, turnover, and cube‐per‐order index (COI) performed best among slotting measures. Several new storage assignment strategies utilizing the concept of “golden zone” picking, which slots high demand stock‐keeping units (SKUs) at the height between the picker's waist and shoulders, were introduced. Results from the simulation study show that the golden zone storage assignment strategies generated significant savings in order fulfillment time compared to storage policies that ignore the golden zone concept.Originality/valueProvides an evaluation of slotting measures and storage assignment strategies that generated significant savings in order fulfillment time.

Unit-load storage assignment strategy for warehouses in seismic areas

“…Research widely faces the storage assignment problem for both automatic and manual warehouses (Chan & Chan, 2011;Fontana & Cavalcante, 2014;Petersen, Charles, & Heiser, 2005;Van Den Berg & Zijm, 1999;Xie, Mei, Ernst, Li, & Song, 2014;Xu, Lim, Shen, Li, & IEEE., 2008). The formers are, typically, served by AS/RSs, jointly moving horizontally and vertically, allowing high handling service levels.…”

A two-phased heuristic for relation-based item location

“…Some of these are item popularity, item turnover, item volume and cube-per-orders index (COI), (Petersen, Siu, & Heiser, 2005). COI was the first of these methods and was introduced by Heskett (1963) and has since been studied extensively (Gu, Goetschalckx, & McGinnis, 2007;Mantel, Schuur, & Heragu, 2007;Petersen et al, 2005).…”

Evaluation and improvement of warehousing systems: a case study of x firm in Turkey

“…These functions are presented on a flow route in Figure 3 (Smith, 2007;de Koster et al, 2007;Petersen and Aase, 2004). The functions can be declared briefly as follows (de Koster et al, 2007;Smith, 2007;Siu and Heiser, 2005):…”

“…In order to prevent this disorder, an addressing system should be established. By applying this, every item would have its own address so that the received items would be stored directly in their permanent storage bins and the items to be shipped are picked from their predefined addresses (Siu and Heiser, 2005;Rouwenhorst et al, 2000).…”