Warehouse with Bins

Challenge

This client wanted to optimize the time it takes for a set of operators to do the picking process based on a list of 15 items. The strategy was to locate the products with more demand in better positions and compare the resulting time with the time currently needed.

Solution

The solution was developed in AnyLogic using exclusively the process modeling library. The location of each product was defined in an Excel database and the picking list was defined randomly based on the statistics of real picking lists.

In these cases, the normal procedure is to generate a comparative experiment. However, since the assumption was that a product was always available, the simulation was created as a race between the group looking for products in the old bins and the group in the new bins. This allowed clear visualization of how and why the differences in time were so significant.

Outcome

The conclusion was that the new positions saved around a minute of time in average for each picking when using 2 workers. Nevertheless, when reaching 4 workers, the new positions made no difference at all and were even worse with 5 workers. Optimizing warehouse positions to minimize time is a very complicated mathematical problem, so visualizing clearly in which cases the new positioning was better proved very useful.

Project Features

• Industry: Warehouse
• Model: Discrete Events
• Duration: 2 weeks