Risk control for staff planning in e-commerce warehouses

Abstract

Internet sale supply chains often need to fulfil quickly small orders for many customers. The resulting high demand and planning uncertainties pose new challenges for e-commerce warehouse operations. Here, we develop a decision support tool to assist managers in selecting appropriate risk policies and making staff planning decisions in uncertain conditions. Multistage stochastic modelling has been used to analyse risk optimisation approaches and expected value-based optimisation. Exhaustive numerical and practical validations have been performed to test the tool's applicability. We demonstrate, using a Dutch e-commerce warehouse, that the multi-period conditional value at risk appears to be most applicable.

Formulating and solving the integrated batching, routing, and picker scheduling problem in a real-life spare parts warehouse

“…As accuracy in delivery times is an essential performance indicator for warehouses (Wruck et al, 2017), respecting due times is a critical issue when batching orders and routing pickers (Henn and Schmid, 2013;. This initiates an additional planning problem: the picking sequence and completion time of all batches should be determined .…”

“…Serving e-commerce markets, globalisation and increased customer expectations further increase the complexity of managing order picking operations. Warehouses are forced to handle a larger number of small orders, while the time to pick orders has shortened (Wruck et al, 2017).…”

Risk Mitigation Via Integrating House of Risk and Probability Impact Matrix in Halal Food Supply Chain

“…Defective products are at risk in product quality, which cannot be sold on the market [3]. Other factors affect the risk, including problems with stopped production [4], unbalanced employee workloads [5], and improper supplier management [6]. In risk management, the ideal situation is when potential sources of risk in the supply chain are found.…”

Designing efficient order picking systems by combining planning problems: State-of-the-art classification and review

“…retrieval of items in the warehouse to fulfill customer orders) is the most costly warehouse activity (Marchet et al, 2015). Since warehouses deliver labor-intensive services to customers, underperformance may result in high (labor) costs and unsatisfied customer demand (Wruck et al, 2016). New market developments, such as e-commerce, globalisation, increased customer expectations and new regulations, have intensified competition among warehouses and forces warehouses to handle a large number of small orders within tight time windows (Marchet et al, 2015).…”