An interventionist strategy for warehouse order picking: Evidence from two case studies

As the role of the customer becomes more important in modern logistics, warehouses are required to improve their response to customer orders. To meet the responsiveness expected by customers, warehouses need to shorten completion times. In this paper, we introduce an interventionist order picking strategy that aims to improve the responsiveness of order picking systems. Unlike existing dynamic strategies, the proposed strategy allows a picker to be intervened during a pick cycle to consider new orders and operational disruptions. An interventionist strategy is compared against an existing dynamic picking strategy via a case study. We report benefits both in terms of order completion time and travel distance. This paper also introduces a set of system requirements for deploying an interventionist strategy based on a further case study.