Prioritizing Replenishments of the Forward Reserve

Having sufficient inventories in the piece-picking area of a warehouse is an essential condition for warehouse operations. This requires a timely replenishment of the products from a reserve area in case they could run out of stock. In this paper we develop analytical models to arrive at priority rules for these replenishments in case replenishments and order picking are done simultaneously because of time pressure. This problem was observed in a warehouse of a large cosmetics firm. The priority rules are compared by means of simulation and regression. Finally we present the results of applying one of these rules in practice.