Execution Failures in Retail Supply Chains-A Virtual Reality Experiment

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dehoratius, Nicole; Guererk, Ozgur; Honhon, Dorothee; Hyndman, Kyle
• 署名单位: University of Chicago; University of Cologne; University of Texas System; University of Texas Dallas
• 刊物名称: PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1059-1478
• DOI: 10.1177/10591478241275066
• 发表日期: 2025
• 页码: 1236-1255
• 关键词: Inventory inaccuracy; Retail supply chain; variety; Order picking; human error; Omnichannel retail

摘要

Retail store employees are increasingly being asked to pick orders from inventory. These tasks are performed under intense conditions and are often made more difficult because of high product variety and high degrees of product similarity. We conduct a real-effort task in a virtual environment where subjects must sort cubes into bins. We study task complexity by varying the degree of similarity between the cubes and task intensity by varying the arrival rate of the cube. We focus on four performance metrics: Throughput (number of cubes sorted per minute), Accuracy (percentage of correctly sorted cubes), Productivity (number of correctly sorted cubes per minute), and Error Rate (number of incorrectly sorted cubes per minute). Reducing task complexity increases productivity by as much as 38.2%, and the error rate falls by as much as 93.6%. It also leads to more efficient movements, according to a detailed analysis of our subjects' motion. Increasing task intensity improves throughput but decreases accuracy slightly while varying task intensity improves performance via faster learning. We also observe that subjects tend to cut corners when the task is more complex or more intense.