The parts of the Online 4 Baby project which is most gratifying to do is the Warehouse Management and Stock Control. There was a lot to learn here, a lot to improve upon, and a nice problem to work upon.

Essentially the problem is one which will have been met with a thousand times or more. How to pick effectively. Primo increases the number of options when it comes to warehouse management for Online 4 Baby. Because the orders are in a database and the items which need to be sent out are easily accessible things that had been taken for granted were looked at again.

By their earlier system Online 4 Baby had to pick all the items in an order together, now that is no longer the case. So long as all the items in an order are sent the same day the courier is happy.

The task at hand is minimising the amount of walking the picking staff have to do in order to complete the days orders. There are a number of things Primo has done to achieve this:-

1. The highest selling items are stored nearest the packing area.
2. Orders are picked depending upon location in warehouse, not the time the order received. Essentially, if there are 8 of a particular item to be sent out they are all picked together rather than picking them with the order of which they may only be a small part. Of course there are some limits built in to make sure that orders get sent on the correct day.
3. To help the pickers deal with the case where they do have to walk around the warehouse for their next batch of items Artumi Systems has developed a shortest route finder which is used to order the items on the batch sheet to minimize the walking distance. This was particularly pleasing for us as the warehouse is large and the program had to be able to figure out the route quickly as the ordering system is based on real time orders.
4. Obviously, only some pallet spaces can be picked from, the rest are used for storage. Primo is asked to choose a pallet space as stock comes in, and it finds the closest pallet space to the area where the produce will eventually be picked from. This further reduces the amount of time required to replenish the picking spaces.

Usually web application development is more about moving data around than calculation, so this part of the project was particularly nice to work on.

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