The company and the warehouse
Walgreens is a national chain of drugstores, selling both pharmaceuticals, personal care products, and sundries.
Concerns of Walgreens
Most Walgreens DCs coordinate their split-case order-pickers by bucket brigades. This has worked well for them and they report productivity boosts of 10-100 percent (although the higher end of these estimates may be questionable). They would like to use bucket brigades at the Anderson DC as well, but the design of this DC interferes with typical bucket-brigade operations.
- Walgreens has relatively many aisles, each of which is relatively short and so there are relatively few SKUs in each. Furthermore the SKUs are stored by product family, not by popularity, and so the levels of activity within an aisle may be highly variable. Because the aisles are short and may not include much of the most popular SKUs, some aisles so may have only a few workers at a time, which means that there may be reduced benefits to bucket brigades.
- Each aisle has three induction points at which totes might arrive, so work can appear in the midst of the aisle. The induction points have capacity of only 4-5 totes and any subsequently-arriving totes will be forced to circulate on the conveyor and try to enter the aisle later. Therefore workers cannot let newly-arriving totes wait too long before moving them into the aisle. This can interfere with the movement of bucket brigades.
- Because Walgreens has so many aisles, it can be difficult to keep progress among the aisles synchronized, so that uniform progress is made in picking the day's orders.
Walgreens has also expressed interest in some related issues.
- What would be the benefits of allowing SKUs to be stored in multiple locations?
- What would be the benefits of rearranging the storage of SKUs within aisles?
Data
This will have been distributed to group leaders on CD.
Here is a more recent snapshot of picks on which you can test some of your ideas; and here is the cross-reference between picker log-on and the picker id.
First steps
- Read the chapter in the textbook on pieces/eaches and the website on
order-picking by bucket
brigades.
- What are the most-frequently requested SKUs? The SKUs that move in largest volumes? The most frequently-restocked? Where are they located? How do levels of activity differ among the aisles?