Best Practices for the Warehouse Picking Process
Order picking is a crucial part of any warehouse operation. It plays a significant role in the fulfillment process, especially for businesses with an omnichannel retail presence. To ensure customer service levels, you need to be able to pick orders quickly and accurately, as well as have the ability to sort and organize items on shelves as they are being picked.
This article will discuss the best practices for picking orders, how to increase accuracy and efficiency when sorting and picking, and why investing in order-picking solutions can help streamline your fulfillment process.
Why You Should Optimize Your Order-Picking Process
Order picking is one of the most labor-intensive and time-consuming processes in any warehouse operation. As such, pickers must be adequately trained and understand the importance of accuracy when selecting items for an order.
Optimizing the order-picking process can help increase accuracy and speed while reducing labor costs. When warehouse managers refine their picking system to reduce inventory errors, decrease congestion, and improve overall customer satisfaction, they accelerate the order-fulfillment process and position themselves for long-term success. Introducing new order-picking methods sets the stage for sustainable growth and makes implementing more advanced picking strategies easier.
Other benefits of improved order-picking strategies include:
- Increased accuracy in order picking
- Reduced time spent on order selection
- Reduced labor costs
- Fewer inventory errors
- Decreased congestion in the warehouse
- Improved customer satisfaction
Best Practices for How to Pick Orders in the Warehouse
Here are some tips to help you refine the order-picking process in your warehouse:
Introduce a Picking Strategy That Aligns With Your Needs
Before selecting an order-picking system, it is crucial to consider the needs of your warehouse. Is speed more important than accuracy? Are you planning on scaling up or down in the near future? Do you need to accommodate a large number of orders? Answering these questions can help you pick the right strategy for your business.
Consider implementing one of the following picking methods to structure your framework:
Wave Picking
Wave picking involves separating large batches of small orders into smaller groupings and assigning those batches to individual workers or automated picking equipment. Workflow is organized by product, category, or SKU. Each worker can choose the next item in a list directly from a screen instead of picking items from a bin and returning them to the shelf. This system allows you to quickly pick many orders without sacrificing accuracy.
Batch Picking
Batch picking is a process that combines multiple orders into batches and assigns each to a picker. This method is ideal for warehouses with a high volume of SKUs or products. It helps reduce the time spent walking back and forth between the shelves and the packing area, as each picker would only have to walk to the shelf once to get multiple orders.
Zone Picking
Zone picking is a process that divides the warehouse into different zones or areas and assigns each zone to a picker. Their job is to select products from their designated location and place it in totes. This arrangement allows multiple pickers to work with different products simultaneously, so pickers do not have to walk across the warehouse to collect products. The zone method is a faster alternative to a serialized or linear approach, which does require a person or goods-to-person robot to cross an entire warehouse to pick SKUs.
Cluster Picking
Cluster picking is a method that combines multiple orders into one and then has the picker move from zone to zone to retrieve all the products from each order. While cluster picking is faster than a serialized approach, it can become more difficult for workers to keep track of which items need to be placed in which order, negatively impacting accuracy. To ensure accuracy, warehouse operators should use pick-to-light systems or other technology that can help remind the picker which items need to be placed in which order.
High-performance case-picking systems introduce new efficiencies to your warehouse operations, improving your time to delivery and boosting your customer satisfaction. Polymatic Solutions has the resources to reframe your approach to the process.
Implement Mobile Robots for Automated Picking
Autonomous mobile robots are a strategic investment for companies looking to reduce labor costs and speed up their order-picking process. Goods-to-person robots are a cost-effective, flexible alternative to traditional warehouse technologies such as order-picking systems, conveyors, and lift trucks.
These robots navigate the warehouse, autonomously scanning and retrieving items from shelves. Mobile robots can free up workers to focus on other tasks, allowing your organization to run more efficiently and scale more flexibly to operational demands.
Organize Your Inventory
Organizing your inventory is essential in improving the accuracy and speed of order picking. While finding space to store more inventory is challenging, ensuring workers have adequate space on shelves, bins, or racks to organize items can help keep things easily identifiable. Many retailers use labels on shelves, containers, and racks so workers quickly know where to find items. Organizing inventory by size, color, frequency of sales, or some other attribute can help make items faster and easier to find.
Invest in Automated Systems
When preparing an order for shipment, you must find each product, place it in a box, and ensure all inventory is accounted for. While this process may sound simple, many things can go wrong if mishandled. An unoptimized picking and shipping process creates obstacles for your staff and prevents you from meeting customer demand.
Automation can improve the accuracy and speed of order picking. Automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS) use robotic arms or shuttles to move items to a designated pick station. This is usually a multiple-point pick station with built-in sortation and other processes. Since only one worker is needed to operate the system, it can save time, reduce labor costs, and increase accuracy since the worker running the AS/RS only has to concern themselves with loading one item at a time.
Collaborate With Polymatic Solutions for Warehouse Order-Picking Technologies
To achieve quick and accurate order picking, it is essential to have strategies that elevate the process and eliminate inefficiencies. At Polymatic Solutions, we use various technologies to optimize your warehouse order-picking process.
We start by carefully analyzing the layout of your warehouse and the size and shape of the items you pick. Our team recommends a combination of automated and manual solutions to ensure your orders are picked quickly, accurately, and efficiently.
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