Increasing warehouse order picking performance by sequence optimization

As the travel time covers a substantial part of picking processes in warehouses, an appropriate sequencing of picking lines within a batch is crucial to achieve high efficiency. Routing heuristics for line sequencing in order picking batches are well researched, documented and implemented in today's Warehouse Management Systems (WMS). For storage areas in practice where routing heuristics could hardly be applied, an optimisation routine could be an alternative. Based on a digitised network, the Line Sequence Optimisation (LSO) calculates the line sequence for a given batch with the minimum travel time. For a case study at a distributor in the electronic devices business segment, the quantitative evaluation showed an overall improvement potential of 7,4%. But in contrast to systematically working heuristics for routing, the sequences generated by the LSO may look illogical to the picker - a qualitative evaluation needs to follow to identify sequence patterns and to discuss the methodology with the picking personnel.