Evaluating the effects of different factors on the order picking efficiency in the single-block warehouse
Keywords:
picking route, storage assignment, order picking, warehousingAbstract
Warehouse operations are labor-intensive activities, and they account for the highest share of the total logistics cost. Among the various operations in warehouses, order picking, which is the process of retrieving a set of requested items from specified storage locations in a warehouse, is one of the most critical ones. The picking travel distance required by the order pickers has profound effects on the warehouse throughput. Hence, reducing this unproductive traveling of the order pickers is a significant lever for increasing the total warehouse throughput. The focus of the paper at hand is to evaluate the effects of four main factors, including pick-list sizes, depot location, order picker routing policies, and storage assignment policies on the picking travel distance in a single block warehouse. We simulate all possible combinations of several levels and evaluate the main and interaction effects using the analysis of variance (ANOVA). According to ANOVA analysis, all main single effects and two-way interactions have a statistically significant effect on the picking travel distance at a level of significance of 0.05. On the other hand, most of the three-way interactions are not statistically significant at an of 0.05, except the three-way interactions between pick-list sizes, depot location, and storage assignment policies. In terms of four-way interactions, they are not statistically significant at an of 0.05.
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