Design and Simulation of Outbound Functions in Warehouse Operations with Queueing Theory

In modern e-commerce, warehouse management is very crucial for overall service quality. Moreover, the cost of order picking in outbound logistics is estimated to be more than half of the total operating cost in warehouse activity. This work studies the factors of the order processing on average customer order throughput time where the picking, packing, and sorting functions are executed separately by either a single operator or multiple parallel operators. The proposed staff management by using the queuing theory is demonstrated. The data comprise a complete operational history of an e-commerce company, order by order, over 3 months in the year 2020. The queuing theory and statistic model are used to study this activity of the warehouse. To evaluate the efficiency of these operations, the simulation method is utilized. The result shows that the simulation is adequate in approximating the optimal number of pickers and packers. This work is explained generally to be practical for business leading to future research opportunities and giving more solutions from the existing technology supporting and solving the problems.