Optimization of order picking work flow at the e-commerce logistics centers

Abstract

In the recent years, E-commerce has been growing rapidly in China. From a logistic perspective, efficient order picking is a key issue to improve the service level and to reduce the overall cost. Targeting at the subsection of Chinese B2C E-commerce businesses that adopt the so-called “outsourcing self-storage and distribution” model, this paper aim to address the inefficiency of the current approaches by thoroughly analyzing the entire production process of the logistics centers from order creation to goods packaging. In particular, we focus on the labor-intensive order picking step which is widely considered the bottleneck of the entire logistic chain. We explore the order picking optimization theory and study the corresponding mathematical models. We use clustering heuristic algorithms to solve the problem and carry out verification in the SQL2008 + VS2010 environment. Comparing with traditional order picking systems, we demonstrated that our approach can effectively reduce the operational cost of an E-commerce logistics center and enhance the order picking operation management level.