New strategies in the order picking process

Increasingly important issues for every organization in the warehousing business are to achieve a high efficiency of all processes, minimize operational costs and maximize flexibility of the labor force. Among all processes, order picking is recognized to be the most significant and most costly activity and therefore tends to get the most attention. Key objectives in designing an order picking operation include increases in productivity and accuracy, and reduction of cycle time and replenishment costs. The aim of this article is to present a proposal of improved wave planning processes and modifications to the wave planning technique. With those modifications it is possible to reduce cost and time to process a wave by reducing the distance traveled by an order picker, the retrieval time per item and the replenishment costs.