Research On The Optimization Of Order Picking In Automotive Spare Parts Warehouse

Thanks to the robust growth in automobile volume in Chinese market,the demand for automotive spare parts is also experiencing fast growth,therefore "automotive after-sales market" is believed to play moreimportant role in the entire vehicle industry in the future. More emphasisshould be put on automotive spare parts logistics and the solutions how toenhance the overall efficiency in the automotive spare parts logisticsshould be found.Among the procedures in automotive spare parts logistics, thedistribution centers are responsible for the supply and distribution, whichis demonstrated as a main function of the logistics flow. It provides goodsolution to the conflicts between clients’ demand with small quantities ofspecialized products and spare parts manufacturers with high-volumeproduction. The efficiency of distribution center could seriously affect thesuccess of the whole logistics process. Therefore, it is really important forlocal distribution centers to learn and implement the success operationalexperience from foreign leading automotive spare parts distribution centers,seize the great opportunity during the fast growing in "automotiveafter-sales market" and improve its overall logistics efficiency in order toprovide better services to meet its clients’ demand.This paper is based on actual projects about Company F and we havemade on-site survey and management interview in order to help usunderstand the operational process in Company F and its main problems.In order to make constructive suggestion on picking process for CompanyF, we have firstly conducted in-depth theoretical research on picking process and main picking strategies. In order to solve the biggest problemin Company F, which is the unbalance among different pickers and theserious backlog in inspection area, we developed a collaborativeparallel-zoning picking strategy, considering the total transportation andinventory costs, picking vehicles capacity and so on. The objectivefunction is to minimize the time difference of different pickers in the samebatch. In order to solve the model, an improved genetic algorithm wasproposed with updated selection operator, crossover operator and mutationoperator. Then we used the real order data from daily picking operation inCompany F combined with C#programming language in order to testifythe validity and efficiency of the proposed model and improved geneticalgorithm. Compared with the data, it is shown that the difference amongeach picker has been shrunk with reasonable time and duty allocation.Besides, the result also clarified the effectiveness on reducing the backlogand delay in the inspection waiting area.Then in this paper, we made suggestion for company to use bothhardware and software to help spare parts warehouse improve its pickingprocess. The practical applications could help automotive spare partsdistribution centers really improve its entire picking utilization. Besides,the automotive spare parts could also learn successful experience fromforeign distribution centers and select some methods to implement in thereal operational procedures. The target is to really improve the pickingefficiency of distribution center and reduce the error rate in the entirepicking process.