1. Introduction and background
In recent years, enterprises have completely reconfigured their supply chain to address increasing customer service levels and demand variability. Warehouses play a pivotal role in the supply chain, and requirements for warehousing operations have signifi- cantly increased. Specifically, the customer needs in terms of the order accuracy and response time, order frequency, order quantity and order size have dramatically changed with the global economy and new demand trends (e.g., e-commerce). The literature has widely debated the issues of warehouse design and management, which is aimed at minimising the operation costs and time and increasing the supply chain performance. Comprehensive surveys on warehouse and …show more content…
Fig. 1 illustrates a conceptual framework for classifying warehouse operations, considering the definitions of entities, processes, activities, and decisions as related to storage systems.
Products typically arrive in large units, such as unit-loads, and standard or custom containers, or pallets, which cause the related labour and handling activities to be less expensive. Incoming products must be put away, which is the most significant warehouse function. The put-away process entails a set of interdependent decisions [2]: given a warehouse configuration
(based on the layout parameters of Fig. 1), how much inventory should be held for a generic SKU (the so-called allocation in Fig. 1), and where should it be stored (the so-called assignment in Fig. 1)?
The warehousing system pursues the transformation of the large and relatively homogeneous arrival materials into small, frequent and heterogeneous output quantities in response to customer demands. The small and frequent output quantities result from the fulfilment of the customer order lists.
Order picking is one of the prime components of labour and warehouse-associated costs. Two alternative configurations …show more content…
1).
The literature proposes a wide set of warehouse KPIs that include the throughput capacity (the material flow processed through the warehouse per time unit), the storage capacity, the response time (the time within the order arrival and its shipment), the cost rate, and the cost per unit of material flow shipped by the warehouse. All of these metrics are affected by the management of space and time, which are critical for every logistic process.
Generally, the contributions of the literature address the problem of warehouse design rather than the management of warehouse operations separately. Gu et al. [2] describe inbound/ outbound processes and review the literature, classifying the papers on the basis of the scope of analysis, the adopted method and the type of the observed warehouse (e.g., automated, conventional multi-aisle storage systems).
Typically, warehousing problems are non-polynomial (NP) problems and have a very large amount of real-world data to manage. Therefore, user-friendly and timeless solutions for the warehousing issues are ambitious aims for computer-based
In recent years, enterprises have completely reconfigured their supply chain to address increasing customer service levels and demand variability. Warehouses play a pivotal role in the supply chain, and requirements for warehousing operations have signifi- cantly increased. Specifically, the customer needs in terms of the order accuracy and response time, order frequency, order quantity and order size have dramatically changed with the global economy and new demand trends (e.g., e-commerce). The literature has widely debated the issues of warehouse design and management, which is aimed at minimising the operation costs and time and increasing the supply chain performance. Comprehensive surveys on warehouse and …show more content…
Fig. 1 illustrates a conceptual framework for classifying warehouse operations, considering the definitions of entities, processes, activities, and decisions as related to storage systems.
Products typically arrive in large units, such as unit-loads, and standard or custom containers, or pallets, which cause the related labour and handling activities to be less expensive. Incoming products must be put away, which is the most significant warehouse function. The put-away process entails a set of interdependent decisions [2]: given a warehouse configuration
(based on the layout parameters of Fig. 1), how much inventory should be held for a generic SKU (the so-called allocation in Fig. 1), and where should it be stored (the so-called assignment in Fig. 1)?
The warehousing system pursues the transformation of the large and relatively homogeneous arrival materials into small, frequent and heterogeneous output quantities in response to customer demands. The small and frequent output quantities result from the fulfilment of the customer order lists.
Order picking is one of the prime components of labour and warehouse-associated costs. Two alternative configurations …show more content…
1).
The literature proposes a wide set of warehouse KPIs that include the throughput capacity (the material flow processed through the warehouse per time unit), the storage capacity, the response time (the time within the order arrival and its shipment), the cost rate, and the cost per unit of material flow shipped by the warehouse. All of these metrics are affected by the management of space and time, which are critical for every logistic process.
Generally, the contributions of the literature address the problem of warehouse design rather than the management of warehouse operations separately. Gu et al. [2] describe inbound/ outbound processes and review the literature, classifying the papers on the basis of the scope of analysis, the adopted method and the type of the observed warehouse (e.g., automated, conventional multi-aisle storage systems).
Typically, warehousing problems are non-polynomial (NP) problems and have a very large amount of real-world data to manage. Therefore, user-friendly and timeless solutions for the warehousing issues are ambitious aims for computer-based