Claudia Chackelson

Evaluating order picking performance trade-offs by configuring main operating strategies in a retail distributor: A Design of Experiments approach

Warehouse design has become important due to its impact on service to customers and total logistics costs. Order picking is the key activity of a warehouse and an appropriate design will directly affect its overall performance. The increasing complexity of warehouses means that the main operating strategies such as storage location assignment, batching and routing need to be considered simultaneously. A Design of Experiment approach aided by Discrete Event Simulation could help to meet these new picking design process requirements, especially when various performance measures need to be compared. Some of the trade-offs that managers must keep in mind when designing order picking systems are shown, describing a single-case study carried out at a retail distributor.

A World Class Order Picking Methodology: An Empirical Validation

Order picking is the process of retrieving products from storage in response to a specific customer order. Although this process’ design has significant impact on warehouse global performance, a practical-oriented design procedure is still lacking in literature. This paper presents a novel order picking system design methodology based on Design for Six Sigma approach, that aims to assist designers making decisions by suggesting the most effective operational and organizational policies and the equipment needed in order to fulfill customer’s orders. A case research in a home appliances manufacturer is presented in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.

An Expert System for Inventory Replenishment Optimization

Companies survive in saturated markets trying to be more productive and more efficient. In this context, to manage more accurately the finished goods inventories becomes critical for make to stock production systems companies. In this paper an inventory replenishment expert system with the objectives of improving quality service and reducing holding costs is proposed. The Inventory Replenishment Expert System (IRES) is based on a periodic review inventory control and time series forecasting techniques. IRES propose the most effective replenishment strategy for each supply classed derived of an ABC-XYZ Analysis.