Divide and Rule

The Pizza Problem

I love Pizza and frequently order from a shop that guarantees to deliver a Pizza at my doorstep within 30 minutes from placing the order. I always wondered what it takes for them to receive an order, prepare a Pizza, get it packed with sides, travel to the destination locality, search for the correct house and then ring the bell – all within 30 minutes – every single time.

Usually it takes around 12-14 minutes to prepare a Pizza and they cannot cut short that time. Packing, billing etc. will take its own 2-3 minutes as well and then the delivery guy has to travel a certain distance which s/he cannot fly and cover (I stay in Bangalore and the traffic here is a maddening). So what are they doing differently for making the timely deliveries?

One fine day I happened to visit their store and peeped into their back room. There was a map of my area in a frame with the glass-top and on the glass they had drawn straight lines something like this –

Curious about the map and those partitioning I asked the store manager about the specifics of the map. He told me that he has divided full area into imaginary zones and assigned one each to his delivery boys. The delivery boys are supposed to know every main road, every cross road and every landmark of that zone. So that when they are out for delivery in their own assigned zone they do not waste time finding the destination. The manager said that it is impossible for 6 delivery boys to know full 6 Km² of that area but it is very much possible for one single person to know 1 Km² of the same area. Now, all he needs to do is that the right delivery person is assigned to the order placed from the right zone.
It struck to my mind that their problem is similar (if not the same) to the one in a typical warehouse, i.e. to fulfill an order quickly. And for a similar problem why can’t we have a similar solution? Why can't we too 'Divide and Rule'? –


Warehouse Partitioning
What if we partition the Warehouse Storage locations into zones and assign those zones to individual pickers? Take the example of a Warehouse which is 10,000 sq. ft., has roughly around 4000 storage locations and around 8 pickers cover those 4000 locations. Now it is impossible for 8 pickers to know what is where in 4000 locations. But it is very much possible for 1 picker to know what is where in his quota of 500 locations. This does not mean that the picker will have to know exactly which box contains what, but he can have a rough idea in his mind that the items in his zone are in so and so order, the smaller SKUs are kept here and next to them are the fragile ones… and so on.

This will solve two problems – first being the quickness in identifying an item, which can be a lot quicker than earlier when the picker was dependent on the system to guide him. It is like searching for a house in a neighborhood with the help of GPS (which more often than not will take you to the correct house) Vs. searching for a house in your own neighborhood (to which you are well versed of and you do not need a GPS). Obviously you will find the house (read location) faster when it is in your own neighborhood.

Secondly, one of the major pain points for the workforce in a warehouse is that they have to walk a lot. I read an interview of a Picker who worked in a large Amazon Warehouse that he had to walk over 30 miles a day (within the warehouse off course). This might be a one off case but we all know that a pickers typically has to walk a LOT. So if we go for ‘Warehouse partitioning’ approach, the distance travelled by the Pickers can be reduced drastically as well. Which in turn will keep them happy and less tired, which in turn will add to more productivity for the Warehouse.

There can be some challenges with this approach like what if a picker who is familiar from his zone is unavailable (then the business will run as it does today, depending on the systems available today – big deal) OR the picking traffic for one zone is more than the other (that is why the partitioning has to be done more sensibly in our case and we cannot just put squares like that in case of the Pizza Store) OR there can be some other similar problems, but with due diligence (I believe) those problems can certainly be tackled I believe.

There can be an argument against this approach saying that we are going back to old / manual ways. Well first of all, not everything is bad with ‘old ways’. Secondly, the suggested approach will be a hybrid between the old and the new ways of doing the job!!!

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