Hybrid order picking strategies for fashion E-commerce warehouse systems

E-commerce has become an increasingly relevant business in Southeast Asia. Effective warehouse management in terms of order picking is a key competitive advantage in this industry. Fashion products are particularly difficult to efficiently manage in a warehouse as they have high demand variability, with a short shelf-life and very little replenishment. In this work, after a detailed analysis of demand and physical layout of the warehouse, we propose: (1) a new pick list generation algorithm considering aspects such as work balancing and picking time minimization, and (2) a family of picking strategies accounting for possible order configurations and warehouse layout. The main contribution of this work is in the development of hybrid order picking strategies: a combination of zone-based and order-based picking with batching. Simulation is used to assess the performance of these strategies. We have found that these hybrid strategies outperform FIFO order picking often employed in industry.