Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION RESEARCH
Volume 55, Issue 21, Pages 6380-6393Publisher
TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2016.1216659
Keywords
case study; operations planning; order picking management; forecasting; workload balancing
Categories
Funding
- IWT Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology
Ask authors/readers for more resources
In order to differentiate from competitors in terms of customer service, warehouses accept late orders while providing delivery in a quick and timely way. This trend leads to a reduced time to pick an order. This paper introduces workload forecasting in a warehouse context, in particular a zone picking warehouse. Improved workforce planning can contribute to an effective and efficient order picking process. Most order picking publications treat demand as known in advance. As warehouses accept late orders, the assumption of a constant given demand is questioned in this paper. The objective of this study is to present time series forecasting models that perform well in a zone picking warehouse. A real-life case study demonstrates the value of applying time series forecasting models to forecast the daily number of order lines. The forecast of order lines, along with order pickers' productivity, can be used by warehouse supervisors to determine the daily required number of order pickers, as well as the allocation of order pickers across warehouse zones. Time series are applied on an aggregated level, as well as on a disaggregated zone level. Both bottom-up and top-down approaches are evaluated in order to find the best-performing forecasting method.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available