Four Basic Principles That Streamline Your Picking and Packing Operations

Nothing kills profitability faster than an inefficient pick, pack, and shipping operation. Such an operation fails to keep pace with incoming orders, slows delivery times, and motivates unhappy customers to go elsewhere with their business. Throwing more manpower at the problem merely increases labour expenses without guaranteeing a faster operation. The best approach is stepping back and analysing your operation to determine and then correct its inefficiencies. The following basic guidelines will help you do this:

Searching means looking around for something with an unknown location. Whether the searching process encompasses an entire warehouse or the confines of a single bin packed with a large assortment of mixed SKUs, the end result is an inefficient use of time. Don’t allow the hectic pace of order fulfilment devolve your warehouse into a maze. Stay on top of its organisation. Mixing SKUs in a single bin slows down picking speed and reduces picking accuracy. You can drive your SKU search time down to zero by employing technology such as pick to light or voice directed picking in combination with a warehouse management system.

Moving things across a vertical distance such as from a rack or shelf high off the floor takes longer than picking items at floor level. In both cases, you have to walk some floor distance but with the vertically out of reach SKUs, you must also add in the vertical distance. Moving SKUs vertically requires specialised equipment or physically climbing up and down ladders, stairs, or step stools. Place your fast-moving SKUs at the floor level and slower moving items at higher locations.

Walking long distances use up time and fatigue the picker. Locate fast-moving SKUs close to the packing or shipping areas. In addition, minimise the distances between fast-moving SKUs commonly ordered together. This area of fast movers is your “hot zone” of picking activity. Make sure aisle widths in this area accommodate the high picking activity. Rearranging the SKU picking order of each picker can further minimise walking distances.

Consolidate order picking tasks into as few as possible. Rather than pick items into a tote cart that are then packed into shipping cartons, pick them directly into their shipping cartons.

For information on picking, packing, and shipping operations or on warehouse management systems in general, please contact us.