Visualization of Warehouse Pick Lists: a Case Study at Apotea AB

Sammanfattning: Today e-commerce retailers use large warehouses to store goods before they are sold and shipped. One of the main performance issues for Apotea AB, an online pharmacy based in Sweden, is that the staffers who walk around in the warehouse often are delayed in queues or clusters, usually as a result of missing items or difficulties finding items. This paper describes how, based on sparse data, a map-based interactive visualization was created to aid staffers in their task of evaluating how so called pick lists perform. The visualization was evaluated using UMUX-LITE [20] and a grounded model of NOvice’s information VIsualization Sensemaking (NOVIS-model) [17]. Results showed an overall successful design. The main affordance of the visualization was that it showed warehouse performance over time when animation speed was set to maximum, this was enabled by sliders and buttons. The main limitations were found to be a lack of intermediary level of visualization (e.g. heat map overview of an hour) in the visualization and that there was no higher level of data, e.g. incident data, which could be visualized. These limitations represent the core of what this paper identifies as future work.