Optimizing the order picking of a scholar and office supplies warehouse.

The warehouse operation planning in the scholar and office supplies industry encompasses the activities of receiving, storing, order picking, and shipping products. The order picking operation is a laborious and capital intensive procedure. Despite the extensive literature to solve practical problems of warehouse routing as a step of the order picking process, the application of general approaches to deal with the routing of the warehouse pickers is not straightforward given the specific conditions and configurations and the singular design and operational policies commonly found in practice. In this paper, we present an optimization approach to the stacker routing problem found in the order picking of a Brazilian scholar and office supplies company. The approach is based on a routing algorithm that solves different integer linear problems to define the optimal routes of the stacker inside the facility. The solutions of several numerical experiments show the potential and effectiveness of the approach, for instance, that only one fifth of the routes actually performed by the company are optimal and that the algorithm application to a real set of batches reduced by more than one fourth the total distance monthly traveled by the stacker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]