The use of bucket brigades in zone order picking systems

Abstract

As the transactions through electronic commerce and TV home shopping increase, the warehouses often receive a large amount of small orders to be picked within tight time windows. One of the important warehousing activities is order picking, the process of retrieving a number of items from warehouse storage to meet a number of independent customer orders. This paper examines a new order picking method, bucket brigade order picking (BB picking). Bucket brigade is a way of coordinating workers who progressively perform a set of operations on a flow line. In the BB picking system, a worker performs operations on an order until the next worker downstream takes it over; then goes back to the previous worker upstream to take over a new order. We discuss distinct characteristics in order picking systems when bucket brigades are applied. We identify some efficiency losses under the BB picking and present a new BB picking protocol to improve the performance of order picking systems. The new BB picking is compared with the existing BB picking and zone picking through simulation experiments. © Springer-Verlag 2008.