Improving Order-Picking Response Time at Ankors Warehouse

Recommendation
Here we write our main conclusion, just in short to give a framework to the reader

General Analysis
Ankor is a wholesaler that is specialized in tools, hardware and gardening equipment. They are located in Leidschendam, the Netherlands. They need to improve their warehouse efficiency to reduce the costs of the operations. The goal is to find the most efficient way to store the products, and at the same time have the shortest routing for their order picking. As order picking is the most costly operations in a warehouse, it is crucial to find the most efficient way to do this in order to save costs. The warehouse contains over 18 000 products with diverse characteristics, and they are categorized into three groups based on different criteria and each group has their own storage area. The product groups are: (1) The 384 fastest-moving products, (2) Products with longest edge over 80 cm, nonconveyables, and (3) Regular products. In the last group is 17 000 of the 18 000 products. Storage in this group is based on ABC classification, where A is the fastestmoving products, B is medium-moving products, and C is the slow-moving products. They also store the products based on product type, and breakable and unbreakable products have separate sections. Ankor wants to improve the order picking in the warehouse, as this is a major contributor to the operational costs of the company. To be able to do this they need to look at the storage policy and the efficiency of the order-picking process.

Quantitative analysis
In order to improve their operations, they have four choices of heuristic routing methods. The first one is midpoint heuristic where the picker occasionally travels through an entire aisle to go either to the next cross aisle or to the end point of the route. The next one is called largest-gap heuristic and is almost the same, except that the picker goes up an aisle as far as the largest gap instead of to the middle. In the third option, called S-shaped heuristic, the order picker travels through a cross aisle to an aisle with a pick location, and continues crossing the aisles (?). The last one is a combined heuristic, where the heuristic is identical to

S-shape except that here it decides for each aisle whether the picker should traverse it entirely or return to the cross aisle.