Diseño Y Control De Pedidos

European Journal of Operational Research 182 (2007) 481–501
www.elsevier.com/locate/ejor

Invited Review

Design and control of warehouse order picking:
A literature review
´
Rene de Koster *, Tho Le-Duc, Kees Jan Roodbergen
RSM Erasmus University, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Received 29 August 2005; accepted 17 July 2006
Available online 25 October 2006Abstract
Order picking has long been identified as the most labour-intensive and costly activity for almost every warehouse; the
cost of order picking is estimated to be as much as 55% of the total warehouse operating expense. Any underperformance
in order picking can lead to unsatisfactory service and high operational cost for the warehouse, and consequently for the
whole supply chain. In order tooperate efficiently, the order-picking process needs to be robustly designed and optimally
controlled. This paper gives a literature overview on typical decision problems in design and control of manual order-picking processes. We focus on optimal (internal) layout design, storage assignment methods, routing methods, order batching
and zoning. The research in this area has grown rapidly recently.Still, combinations of the above areas have hardly been
explored. Order-picking system developments in practice lead to promising new research directions.
Ó 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Order picking; Warehouse management; Logistics

1. Introduction
As more companies look to cut costs and
improve productivity within their warehouses and
distribution centres, picking hascome under
increased scrutiny. Order picking – the process of
retrieving products from storage (or buffer areas) in
response to a specific customer request – is the most
labour-intensive operation in warehouses with manual systems, and a very capital-intensive operation
in warehouses with automated systems (Goetschalckx and Ashayeri, 1989; Drury, 1988; Tomp*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +31 104081719; fax: +31 10
4089014.
E-mail address: rkoster@rsm.nl (R. de Koster).

kins et al., 2003). For these reasons, warehousing
professionals consider order picking as the highestpriority area for productivity improvements.
Several recent trends both in manufacturing and
distribution have made the order-picking design and
management become more important and complex.
In manufacturing,there is a move to smaller lotsizes, point-of-use delivery, order and product
customisation, and cycle time reductions. In distribution logistics, in order to serve customers, companies tend to accept late orders while providing rapid
and timely delivery within tight time windows (thus
the time available for order picking becomes
shorter). Many smaller warehouses are being
replaced by fewerlarge warehouses to realise economies of scale. In these large warehouses, the daily

0377-2217/$ - see front matter Ó 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2006.07.009

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R. de Koster et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 182 (2007) 481–501

pick volume is large and the available time window
is short. In order to be more responsive to customers, manycompanies have adopted a postponement
strategy (Van Hoek, 2001) leading to various valueadding activities (like kitting, labelling, product or
order assembly, customised packaging or palletisation) that take place in the distribution centre
and which have to be scheduled and integrated in
the order-picking process. Warehouses are also
involved in recovering products, materials, and
productcarriers from customers in order to redistribute them to other customers, recyclers, and
original-equipment manufacturers (De Koster
et al., 2002).
The organisation of order-picking operations
immediately impacts the distribution centre’s and
thereby the supply chain’s performance. Between
the time an order is released to the warehouse and
the time it takes to reach its destination, there...