Journal
MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
Volume 65, Issue 6, Pages 2624-2645Publisher
INFORMS
DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2018.3059
Keywords
retail operations; warehouse operations; learning; task assignment; empirical studies
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The rise in online and multichannel retailing has pushed retailers to give increased attention to their order-fulfillment operations. We study chaotic storage fulfillment systems in which dissimilar items are stored together in a single location. This necessitates a searching task as part of the picking process, which has not been previously studied. We show that pick times increase by as much as 16% as the searching task becomes more difficult. However, the deleterious effect of searching decreases with pick-worker experience. Using simulation, we show that pick times can be improved by incorporating distance, bin density, and picker experience into pick assignments and pick routing. Through properly combining the details of the task and the workers, order-fulfillment productivity can be increased by approximately 5%.
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