This paper proposes an effective fireworks algorithm (FWA), which is a new heuristic algorithm inspired by the phenomenon of a fireworks display, to solve the warehouse-scheduling problem. First, a real-world warehouse-scheduling problem is described in detail, and it is formulated as a constrained single-objective optimization problem. Then an effective FWA, FWA-LSCM, is developed by combining with a local search method and chaotic mutation, which are used to balance the exploration and exploitation of FWA. The experimental results show that FWA-LSCM is a competitive algorithm for a set of 2013 Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) benchmark functions. Finally, the proposed FWA-LSCM is successfully applied to the warehouse-scheduling problem and outperforms other FWA algorithms studied in this paper.