Realization of a short cycle time in warehouse replenishment and order picking

Today's competitive and dynamic environment forces companies to be highly responsive and customer oriented to survive and be successful. This paper considers an automated gantry picking complex with 16 pick zones and 16 replenishment zones. Currently, it operates on a 24-h cycle time. A short cycle time operation allows a warehouse manager to be more responsive, flexible and competitive. For example, it allows insertion of late arriving, but high priority, orders into the current cycle. However, to operate in a short cycle environment, the warehouse operations' planning and execution must be more dynamic, real-time and intelligent. To realize a short cycle time without loss of productivity, a new replenishment process logic for the gantry-picking complex is developed. The main idea of the new replenishment logic is to minimize the set-up time. Experimental results demonstrating the efficiency of the new approach are also presented.