Order-picking methods: improving order-picking efficiency

Order-picking, or the process of retrieving items from storage locations in response to a specific customer request, is the most laborious and the most costly activity in a typical warehouse. This is especially true in the case of the conventional warehouses, with almost 90% of total time spent on order-picking activities and 55% of all operating costs attributed to order-picking. As 50% of total order-picking time is spent on travelling, organisational changes and application of various order-picking methods to reduce travel distances could lead to significant improvements. In this paper, three groups of order-picking methods are analysed: routing, storage and order batching. In order to determine the potential order-picker travel distance savings using a particular method or a combination of various methods, an extensive simulation is done. The presented results showed up to 80% possible reduction of travel distances using the appropriate combination of order-picking methods.