The effect on fulfillment time of the M-Division warehouse design approach

In last years, we are facing on the diffusion of on-line orders, a process further accelerated by the spread of the COVID-19 virus. A fundamental lever in the use of the e-Commerce is the continuous reduction of the fulfillment time. In order to obtain these improvements, the storage method has been revolutionized. In fact, we are talking about Online order fulfillment warehouses (F-Warehouses) which, unlike traditional warehouses, have a very large number of small bin locations, an explosive storage policy, where an incoming bulk is separated into small lots stocked in any bin throughout the warehouse, and commingled bin storage. The divided warehouse (M-Division) with explosive storage is a novel design, where the warehouse is divided in M-zones managed by specific pickers. In this paper we model the fulfillment process as an N server queuing model with uniform service times and compare the fulfillment time of the traditional warehouse with the M-Division warehouse. In particular, an analytical solution assigns items to the M-Division warehouse in order to minimize the fulfillment time. The results show that the M-Division approach permits a reduction of the fulfillment time compared with the traditional one.