Resizing the Workforce for Picking Activity: Application in the Fashion Sector

Order picking is one of the most critical activities in warehouses as being the most labor intensive with costs that can be up to 55% of total warehouse expenses. In this context the right sizing of picking workforce is decisive and has to guarantee a satisfactory service level. In this paper, workforce resizing for warehouse picking activities, was investigated in the light of the growth of receptivity required by one of the commissioning firms. Given the high labour intensity in the picking activities, the first phase of our analytical framework for the workforce resizing incl udes a statistical validation of the law of diminishing returns, which can be viewed as an effect of the free-rider behaviour, and then (i.e., second phase) a fitting approach of the said law; the curve that best fits the historical data is used in the third phase to forecast the future productivity. The last phase is made of an analytical procedure to derive the average future required number of ordinary and overtime pickers. We applied our framework in a real warehouse for a firm in the fashion sector, results highlighted a necessity for workforce increase, compared to the “as-is” scenario; this will allow the firm to strategically identify future workforce size requirements, from a cost-based perspective.