Storage assignment policies for retail warehouses processing store-specific shipment buildups

Abstract Shop-floor space in urban areas is scarce and expensive. To avoid a time-consuming zigzag movement when replenishing densely arranged shelves, store-specific shipment buildups (SSSBs) mirror the store layout in the packing pattern of the carriers (e.g., roll cages) on which merchandise arrives in brick-and-mortar sales outlets. If a carrier is pre-sorted according to the layout of its designated store, then the sales personnel can follow a clear route through the store while replenishing the shelves. However, the time savings in the stores come at the price of additional effort in the retail warehouses having to assemble SSSBs. If picker-to-parts order picking is applied to assemble SSSBs, then it is the order pickers who must zigzag through the warehouse. In this paper, we develop and test the performance of novel storage location assignment (SLA) policies that consider order frequencies and store layouts when deciding on the storage positions of stock keeping units on the shelves of a picker-to-parts warehouse. We evaluate these novel policies both with the theoretical optimum if perfect information were available and with traditional SLA policies merely based on order frequencies. These computational tests show that our novel policies can greatly reduce the picking effort during the assembly of SSSBs in picker-to-parts warehouses.