Learning efficient in-store picking strategies to reduce customer encounters in omnichannel retail

Omnichannel retailers are reinventing stores to meet the growing demand of the online channel. Several retailers now use stores as supporting distribution centers to offer quicker Buy-Online-Pickup-In-Store (BOPS) and Ship-From-Store (SFS) services. They resort to in-store picking to serve online orders using existing assets. However, in-store picking operations require picker carts traveling through store aisles, competing for store space, and possibly harming the offline customer experience. To learn picking policies that acknowledge interactions between pickers and offline customers, we formalize a new problem called Dynamic In-store Picker Routing Problem (diPRP). This problem considers a picker that tries to pick online orders (seeking) while minimizing customer encounters (hiding) – preserving the offline customer experience. We model the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and solve it using a hybrid solution approach comprising mathematical programming and reinforcement learning components. Computational experiments on synthetic instances suggest that the algorithm converges to efficient policies. We apply our solution approach in the context of a large European retailer to assess the proposed policies regarding the number of orders picked and customers encountered. The learned policies are also tested in six different retail settings, demonstrating the flexibility of the proposed approach. Our work suggests that retailers should be able to scale the in-store picking of online orders without jeopardizing the experience of offline customers. The policies learned using the proposed solution approach reduced the number of customer encounters by up to 50%, compared to policies solely focused on picking orders. Thus, to pursue omnichannel strategies that adequately trade-off operational efficiency and customer experience, retailers cannot rely on actual simplistic picking strategies, such as choosing the shortest possible route.