Abstract
E-retailing is the delivery of products and services over the Internet, and it has been growing rapidly in recent years. Logistics services in the related warehouses have to be enhanced accordingly in order to handle the huge amount of e-orders in a shorter timeframe. Moreover, since the e-retailing of packaged food has been getting popular, these warehouses inevitably have to handle food products requiring special care, including temperature, humidity and insolation control, and expiry date management. Consequently, suitable storage guidelines have to be formulated for these warehouses to cope with their more demanding daily operations. A cloud-based location assignment system (CLAS) is thus proposed in this article, which provides timely and comprehensive solutions to the storage location assignment problem for warehouse operators. CLAS applies (i) cloud-based infrastructure for enhancing the agility of the proposed system, (ii) fuzzy association rule mining for predicting the potential storage time of various types of packaged food, and (iii) fuzzy logic and association rule mining for offering the most preferred storage locations of various products. A prototype of the CLAS is tested in a warehouse which involves packaged food handling. The test results show that the operational efficiency measured in terms of storage assignment decision-making time and order-picking time and the quality of the storage assignment solutions measured in terms of product disposal rate and product return/exchange rate have been improved in the case company.
Highlights
The trend of e-retailing has been adding pressure to packaged food warehouse operations
E-retailing has been thriving in recent years, as reflected by the annual growth rate of online shopping sales of 17% from 2007 to 2012, equivalent to US$521 billion in 2012, and an estimated sales amount of US$1248.7 billion in 2017.1 The e-commerce sales in China increased by 40% from 2013 to 2014, where the growth was mainly contributed by the food sector.[2]
The system is evaluated in regard to two aspects: benefits of cloud-based location assignment system (CLAS) application and cost analysis of CLAS implementation
Summary
The trend of e-retailing has been adding pressure to packaged food warehouse operations. E-retailing has been thriving in recent years, as reflected by the annual growth rate of online shopping sales of 17% from 2007 to 2012, equivalent to US$521 billion in 2012, and an estimated sales amount of US$1248.7 billion in 2017.1 The e-commerce sales in China increased by 40% from 2013 to 2014, where the growth was mainly contributed by the food sector.[2] Among various food products that are sold online, packaged food is a major category of food e-retailing due to consumer trust in fresh food products.[2,3] Consumers have prior experience regarding packaged food, any perceived risk of buying packaged food is lower.[4] packaged food has become a common option of online food purchase. The warehousing of e-orders, is more complex and time sensitive than that of traditional orders
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