A synchronized production-warehouse management solution for reengineering the online-offline integrated order fulfillment

To improve efficiency in handling online-offline integrated orders, this study aims to reengineer the fulfillment process of production and warehousing in manufacturing enterprises. A two-stage synchronized production-warehouse decision mechanism is proposed based on the postponement strategy. First of all, a decision is made to optimally sequence and assign products of the online and offline orders to production machines to minimize each order's longest processing time. Then, the optimization objective is to minimize the mean warehouse space occupation time of all customer orders by dynamically sequencing all original products and sub-products. The ant colony optimization for production decisions and genetic algorithm for warehousing decisions are also integrated. Results of the case study show that the proposed solution can provide a more flexible and efficient way to deal with dynamic and discrete online orders compared with traditional offline orders, even in the case of online-offline order pattern variations.