Abstract—One of the frequently occurring tasks during the development of warehouse management systems is the implementation of routing algorithms of some kind. Whether it is for routing workers during order picking, delivery vehicles or company representatives, this task has proven to be challenging in the technical as well as the social sense. In other words, the task is heavily dependent on various general and company-specific constraints and it directly dictates the way employees should do their job. This paper describes a strategic approach to the development and gradual integration of such algorithms which makes sure that all constraints are satisfied and, more importantly, ensures that route suggestions are viewed by the employees as a helpful tool rather than a threat to their job. In the first part of this paper, the approach is described and evaluated on a warehouse representative routing problem through a real-world case study in a medium-to-large warehouse. In the second part, the same approach is adapted to a delivery vehicle routing problem for a smaller retailer company. In both cases, routing efficiency almost doubled in comparison to previous approaches used by the companies. The most important factors of the implementation and integration stages as well as the impact of the changes on employee satisfaction are aggregated, analysed in detail, and discussed throughout different stages of development.

Index Terms—Clustering, routing algorithms, travelling salesman problem, warehouse management system.

AI/ML Department, Info Studio d.o.o., Mehmeda Spahe 26, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. 2 Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Sarajevo, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. 3 Department of Computer Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan. 4 Faculty of Science, University of Sarajevo, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (e-mail: emir.zunic@infostudio.ba).

Cite: Emir Zunic, Haris Hasic, Sead Delalic, " Strategic Approach to Implementation and Integration of Routing-Based Tasks in Warehouse Management Information Systems," International Journal of e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 294-311, 2020.

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).