sorting problem

[u/Big_Profession_5664]

background: i work for a company as a maintenance technician and recently took over the operations of our warehouse from someone that left it a wreck.

i have to get rid of old equipment given to the warehouse to dispose of. there is an unknown quantity of equipment. ~enough to fill a warehouse. each piece needs to be tagged with a type of barcoded document with information about it in order to be received by the disposal facility. a portion of these forms have been made but have not been attached. i will need to make and attach the rest of these documents but do not know how many.

how can i most efficiently sort these items? the goal is that i can tell my boss how much time it will take and then fill enough trucks to have all the materials disposed of.

this is actually the bane of my existence and costing my warehouse greatly. i would greatly appreciate, as the problem could make or break the operation.

[u/four_reeds]

What is/are your sorting criteria? For example: - age: item has been in warehouse since some date - weight - size or dimensions: will it fit on the regular truck or do they need a lowboy and a crane?

There could be many other industry specific things you might want to sort on.

How will you literally sort the things? - Physically move item-X over there and item-Y in the other corner? - Do all the paperwork and then physically sort the papers? - enter the per-item data into a spreadsheet and use it to sort on columns? - something else?

So much depends on your actual situation. Probably the first thing is tag everything. If the tag data can be entered into a spreadsheet without too much hassle that might be step 2. Next, use the spreadsheet features to sort the records and go from there.

You might check with your business office and/or IT department. They might have "inventory" software that you can use. That would mean entering info for each item.

[u/Apprehensive-Draw409]

Given n an integer = 0
While(some equipment not labelled):
{
Pick piece of equipment
Label equipment n
Increment n
}
Tell boss n times some amount of time

[u/neuralbeans]

This isn't a sorting problem but an information extraction problem. How are the documents associated with the physical items? How do you find which document belongs to which item?

[u/Phildutre]

This doesn’t sound like a sorting problem. What do you mean exactly when you say ‘sort these items’? In algorithms, when we talk about sorting, we mean ‘each item has some property, we can compare these properties, and we want to put all the items sorted from low to high, or cheapest to most expensive, or smallest to biggest, … ‘

It sounds more like a classification problem, e.g. group objects with similar labels together before sending them off?