4 Best Practices to Improve Order Picking in your Fast-Paced Warehouse

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  • Improving Order Picking

    The rise of ecommerce has led to tremendous pressure for warehouses and distribution centers to increase picking speeds. What can you do to ensure you’re picking a product in the most efficient and productive way?

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Here are a few general best practices you can follow to ensure optimal efficiency:

1. Establish Inventory Management and Tracking Systems

Lots of time can be lost due to low stock or misplaced items. Creating goals and tracking systems ensures that the items you want to pick are able to reach the customer in a timely manner.

2. Slot Efficiently

Critical to fulfill customer orders, data-driven slotting ensures picking and replenishment is always one-step ahead to support next-day or same-day fulfillment needs. With the popularity of low unit, high volume orders, agility and rapid fulfillment are imperative in today’s warehouse.

 

3. Optimize Your Process

Optimization is important in all aspects of your warehouse management. Using telematics can help identify issues, monitor trends, and monitor operator performance. With this data at your fingertips you can make more informed decisions to keep your warehouse running efficiently and productively.

Working with a trusted consulting partner to adjust your warehouse layout can minimize travel time between picking locations, ultimately increasing productivity.  

4. Introduce Automation

Automated picking can result in greater productivity and efficiency because it can be more precise as the WMS integration reduces the chance of human error.

Order fulfillment technology, like Raymond’s Pick2Pallet, can help reduce picking errors by using pick-to-light technology to visually reinforce product placement for order fulfillment in batch picking applications.

Operator assist technologies are a good entry point into the automation era by “semi-automating” or controlling some truck functions/features. They also help in streamlining and optimizing processes by providing tools to operators to be more efficient, productive and accurate.