Product Intelligence in Warehouse Management: A Case Study

Abstract

The need for more flexible, adaptable and customer-oriented warehouse operations has been increasingly identified as an important issue by today's warehouse companies due to the rapidly changing preferences of the customers that use their services. Motivated by manufacturing and other logistics operations, in this paper we argue on the potential application of product intelligence in warehouse operations as an approach that can help warehouse companies address these issues. We discuss the opportunities of such an approach using a real example of a third-party-logistics warehouse company and we present the benefits it can bring in their warehouse management systems.

Adaptive Storage Location Assignment for Warehouses Using Intelligent Products

“…The company warehouses, picks, pack and dispatches goods to endcustomers on behalf of their clients, the retailers. The reader is referred to [6] for more information on the company's business challenges and needs and the opportunities arising from using product intelligence in their operations. In this section we focus on the storing process.…”

“…Recently, adaptive approaches which allow newly delivered products to continuously change their storage location have been introduced and studied in the literature [5]. Because of the distributed nature of such adaptive strategies, it has been proposed that the concept of product intelligence could be used as platform for their implementation in warehouse management systems [6], In this study, motivated by industrial needs of warehouse organisations as well as the opportunities provided by the intelligent product paradigm [7], we develop an adaptive storage assignment strategy aiming at improving the picking performance of a warehouse. A simulation model of a real industrial warehouse is developed and used to conduct a research experiment study and evaluate the impact of the adaptive strategy on picking performance.…”

RFID IoT-enabled warehouse for safety management using product class-based storage and potential fields methods

“…The increase of special characteristics related to huge orders size and products variety along with shorter response-time requests or changes after the initial creation and placement of the order creates disruption in the warehouse managing process (Giannikas et al, 2013).…”

“…For this reason, many researchers have dealt with its problems not only by mathematical modelling but also by artificial intelligence methods and collaborative-based negotiations architectures (Vrysagotis and Kontis, 2011). The crucial goal and key issue for reducing the logistics costs is guaranteeing effective warehouse management (Giannikas et al, 2013). In this context, the two most important aspects to be considered are inventory management and optimal product allocation.…”

Intelligent products: The grace experience

“…The warehouse management is also addressed by using a product intelligence solution (Giannikas, Lu, McFarlane, & Hyde, 2013), particularly focusing on defining adaptive storage location strategies and on the dynamic order-picking rescheduling. Biological inspiration was used to support the product intelligence solution that has been developed for the dynamic routing within a flexible manufacturing system (Sallez et al, 2009).…”