Factors Affecting the Performance of the Pickers in 3PL Warehouses in Sri Lanka: A Systematic Review of Literature

This chapter aims to explore the factors that impact the performance of pickers in third-party logistics (3PL) warehouses in Sri Lanka. Warehouses are critical to a supply chain because they store inventories. In Sri Lanka, warehousing is the most outsourced function in the supply chain. In a warehouse, order picking, the most expensive job, is collecting items from storage locations to tally with the order list, and the employee responsible for this is the picker. Therefore, it is necessary to recognize the factors impacting the picker’s performance. This research conducted a systematic narrative review, summarizing and analyzing the existing literature on three topics: 3PL providers in Sri Lanka, the selector and order-picking process and employee performance. The factors identified from the literature were categorized into employee-related and order-picking-related factors. Most papers investigating employee performance have focused on motivation, leadership and financial reward. In contrast, the papers that analyzed the order-picking process focused on routing, storage assignment and order batching. It is essential to identify the factors affecting the performance of selectors. The 3PL warehouse managers can focus on those factors when improving picker and warehouse performance.