Company’s challenge
To offer a premium express delivery service, mass picking can be replaced by a more reactive on-demand picking whereby orders are individually assigned to pickers. It requires to:
- Optimize simultaneously the assignment of orders to pickers and the routing of pickers in the warehouse ;
- Go beyond a fixed preparation path model by modeling the warehouse with its one-way and dead-end restrictions;
- Consider multiple locations for the same item;
- Avoid congestion at picking points.
Solution provided
The application solver allows to enhance the Warehouse Management System (WMS) of the company. It outputs missions to pickers optimizing both the batch of orders that they receive and their route in synergy.Preparation time plummeted by 20% while inducing a better quality of work for pickers by reducing their travel distance and ensuring a fair repartition of the workload between pickers. The performance of the pickers — measured in terms of number of items picked per hour — is inherently improved.
