Maximizing Pickup Efficiency and Utilization in Online Grocery: Two-Phase Heuristic Approach

Abstract

Online grocery shopping is getting popular in recent time due to convenient online shopping applications, doorstep delivery, and competitive discounts. Specially, this mode of shopping is getting more popularity in urban areas due to resulting saving consumer valuable time. Over the next decade, the demand for online grocery is expected to grow further at least fivefold. Major advantages of using online grocery are that consumer need not stand in long queue to buy grocery items, easy SKU selection and review process, book online their grocery items at discounted price and delivery at convenient time window. Due to this growing consumer demand for online grocery, many big retailers are attracted to invest and improve their services. However, with many aforesaid advantages, there are some challenges for retailers especially additional cost burden on portal management, picking of orders, delivery of orders, and managing seamless services. For instance, ordering online requires easy portal for ordering with the flexibility to cater different consumers requirements, competitive discounted, price, consumer service requirement, delivering product to consumer on given time window, additional workforce for picking SKUs, additional fleet for distribution, and return product mechanism. It has identified that efficient order picking is one of the major challenges where any improvement can provide a significant cost benefit to the company in form of resource minimization. In this paper, our focus is on efficient picking of SKUs. This will help the retailers in completing the pickup of items in minimum time, improving the overall efficiency in terms of picking the items in minimum time by the trolley, and also minimizing the number of buckets leading to reduced number of fleets. This solution methodology can be leveraged across retailer and has huge potential for future research.