Estimate optimal warehouse design for the beverage distribution center

This paper will develop the effectiveness of designing a warehouse by determining the travel distance for the order-picking using a heuristic algorithm. Order picking is the process of retrieving products from a warehouse to fulfill each customer's orders. The order-picking process is one of the processes that cost a lot of money and is time-consuming. Therefore, it can be a significant factor that helps to improve the efficiency of the warehouse. For the data collection, this study required quantitative data such as the demand for each product, the dimension of the warehouse, and the retrieval of products. By using this data, it can determine the product retrieval activity. According to the literature review, many papers propose the modification of the heuristic algorithm, S-shape, largest gap, and TSP method to determine the best route for the travel distance in the warehouse. This study selected a beverage distribution center in Samutprakarn, Thailand as a case study to investigate inventory management practices. Customer order and purchase order data were collected to compute the daily inventory levels of this distribution center. Subsequently, we analyzed the warehouse layout and developed a picking route based on the stock levels of inventory. These findings provide insights for practitioners seeking to optimize inventory operations. After preparing the data, we propose the warehouse simulation to run the warehouse operation in one month by using the VBA (visual basic analysis) language in Excel. There are two scenarios for this case study. the first scenario is the original position of the product while the second scenario is positioning the products based on the percentage of total sales. After simulation in one month, the result shows that the second scenario can save in more than 100,000 steps.