Replenishment and Order Picking in Short Cycle Time Environments

Today's competitive and dynamic environment forces companies to be highly responsive and customer oriented to survive and be successful. Short cycle time operation enables a warehouse manager to be more responsive, flexible and competitive. For example, it more easily handles insertion of late arriving but high priority orders into picking operation. However, to operate in a short cycle environment, the warehouse operations planning and execution must be more dynamic, real-time based and intelligent. In this paper, a new replenishment logic is developed to execute replenishment functions in a short cycle time environment. Experimental results demonstrate efficiency of the new approach.