Improving order preparation processes in warehouse operations and an application in the retail industry

With the globalization of trade and the progress in information technologies, the needs of firms regarding the supply chain management differ day by day. The warehouse management, which constitutes a ring of the supply chain, uses technology to meet the new needs that have emerged and develops day by day. With the spread of e-commerce and the maturation of the competitive environment, the service level standards have increased significantly compared to previous years. With the effects of aggressive competition, the need to manage the supply chain operations more efficiently is becoming more important. Order picking operations, which are an important part of order preparation processes in warehouse operations, require more labor and time resources than other warehouse operations. Improvements to be made in order picking operations in order to ensure cost minimization are considered important in terms of the impact they will create. Within the scope of this thesis, the order preparation processes in the warehouse of an e-commerce company operating in the publishing sector and predominantly selling book products were examined and improvements were suggested and the results obtained from the application were shared. S-shaped, midpoint, return and largest gap routing heuristics available in the literature on order picking route optimization were compared over real data. In order to improve operational efficiency, the routing heuristic that produces the best results was determined and integrated into the order picking algorithm currently used by the company.