Outbound Picking Process
When a customer wants a product that has been stored in the warehouse, the same need to be picked off the shelf (or off the floor) and get it ready for shipping. Depending on how big is the warehouse, picking can take a while. (Many distribution centers cover more than 1 million square feet.). Hence, warehouse order picking methods are an important aspect within any warehouse.
When a customer wants a product that has been stored in the warehouse, the same need to be picked off the shelf (or off the floor) and get it ready for shipping. Depending on how big is the warehouse, picking can take a while. (Many distribution centers cover more than 1 million square feet.). Hence, warehouse order picking methods are an important aspect within any warehouse. Compared to shipping, storage, and receiving stages, order picking forms as much as 55% of operation costs in a distribution center.
If two customers order the same product, one need to pick both items at the same time. And if a single customer orders two products, one would want to pick both products during the same trip. When you think about how much time it takes to travel between where items are stored and where they’re packaged for shipment, you see how
important defining an efficient picking process could be. It has a direct impact on how satisfied your customers are. If your picking methods in the warehouse are quick and accurate, your business will succeed.
This topic describes the picking process in detail and the variations used across industry to design this activity. We will also focus on some best practices deployed across industry. A warehouse management system should generate pick lists for each picker to retrieve items in the most efficient way. For each new order, the picker will receive a packing slip of the items ordered and storage locations at the warehouse. The picker will collect the ordered products from their respective locations. This may include zone picking, wave picking, or batch picking.
What Is Order Picking?
Order picking is the process of selecting items from a warehouse , to fulfill customer orders. When it comes to warehouse order picking methods, the choices you make have a big impact on your supply chain. Choosing the right order picking strategies will go a long way for your business, leading to improvements such as reduced labor costs, improved customer service, and the best use of warehouse space.
The Importance of Order Picking
The order picking process involves pulling items from inventory to fill a customer’s order. This is often seen as the most labor-intensive task within a warehouse. Since order picking often requires heavy physical labor, the process can be slow, affected by human error, and unproductive. Getting customers their orders on time is crucial to the success of any brand or business.
Use of Technology
Technologies introduced in the past few years are make picking more efficient. Given below are some recent innovations:
- A warehouse execution system uses sophisticated routing algorithms.
- Define pick paths that minimize time and distance.
- Use of robots for picking the orders.
- Pick-to-light systems and other displays to give pickers visual cues.
- Pick-to-voice systems telling pickers where to go and what to pick
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After products have been received and passed a quality inspection, they need to be stored so that you can find them when you need them. This process is called putaway. The spot where you store a particular product is called a location. One section of a warehouse might have small locations for light items; another area may have large locations on the floor for heavy items.
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What is a Warehouse & why companies need them?
All organizations hold stocks. In virtually every supply chain, gaps exist between when something is produced and when a customer is ready to buy or receive it. Stocks occur at any point in the supply chain where the flow of materials is interrupted. This implies that products need to be stored during this period of gap.
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One of the warehousing best practices that retailers like Walmart, Amazon, and Target have adopted is known as cross-docking. During this process the inbound products are unloaded at a distribution center and then sorted by destination, and eventually reloaded onto outbound trucks. In real parlance, the goods are not at all warehoused but just moved across the dock (hence the name).
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At a high level, the essential elements in a warehouse are an arrival bay, a storage area, a departure bay, a material handling system and an information management system. As part of the process for enabling a warehouse layout, you must define warehouse zone groups, and zones, location types, and locations.
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The Outbound process starts with routing the shipments. The Outbound execution process starts from the point when pick tasks are completed for an outbound shipment and ends at the point where the outbound packages are loaded into trailers. The Warehouse Outbound process includes managing and controlling outgoing materials starting from the download of orders through to the shipping of products from the warehouse.
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To stay competitive in today’s tough market, the location of your warehouse is vital. To grow retail business need to offer to customers faster and affordable shipping time, which is dependent on the warehousing location as the location of the warehouse affects the transit time to ship orders to customers.
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When a customer wants a product that has been stored in the warehouse, the same need to be picked off the shelf (or off the floor) and get it ready for shipping. Depending on how big is the warehouse, picking can take a while. (Many distribution centers cover more than 1 million square feet.). Hence, warehouse order picking methods are an important aspect within any warehouse.
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Before shipping, businesses need to make sure that the items will arrive in good condition. Packaging is a form of protection against environmental threats that the product will face from the time it leaves warehouse facility until the time it reached the customer. The packaging is intended to provide protection for the item as it is being handled in the warehouse or when the item is being shipped.
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When products arrive at a facility, there need to be a defined process to let them in. The process for accepting inventory when it arrives is called "Receiving". Any warehousing operation must be able to receive inventory or freight from trucks at loading docks and then stow them away in a storage location. Receiving often involves scheduling appointments for deliveries to occur, along with unloading the goods and performing a quality inspection.
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Warehouse management and distribution logistics involve the physical warehouse where products are stored, as well as the receipt and movement of goods takes place. Warehouse management aims to control the storage and movement of products and materials within a warehouse. These operations include the receipting of inwards goods, tracking, stacking and stock movement through the warehouse.
