Event Details

Jamie Fairbrother will present a seminar to the Management Science Department

Abstract: In any retail business, packaging is essential for the protection and transportation of products. Excessive packaging, however, increases costs, and can be off-putting to environmentally-conscious customers. It is therefore important to reduce packaging as much as possible. In this work, we consider the problem of selecting packaging options for dispatching eCommerce orders. In particular, we need to select around a dozen box sizes to use for dispatch in such a way that (i) we can cover almost all orders, (ii) the selected boxes satisfy courier restrictions on size and (iii) we optimize key metrics such as packing efficiency. We model this as a two-stage optimization problem which explicitly incorporates how selected boxes are used for packing for a large sample of orders. We demonstrate this approach using data from a large UK retailer, and our results show that significant improvements in packing efficiency are possible compared to the set of boxes currently being used for dispatch.