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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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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Inventory is money, and hence businesses need to perform physical inventory counts periodically to make sure that their inventory records are accurate. The traditional approach to conducting inventory counts is to shut down a facility during a slow time of year to count everything, one item at a time. This process is slow, expensive, and (unfortunately) not very accurate.
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Warehouses can be places where piles of packed or loose products occupy space. If left disorganized, it will become very challenging to identify products for packing or picking. Hence, proper organization of warehouse is very important. Warehouse labeling systems eliminate this problem by making sure products are easily identified and managed during the warehousing and shipping process. Labeling is the most functional and cost-effective way to keep your warehouse organized and operating efficiently.
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Types of Inventory Count Processes
While dealing with lots of inventory in a warehouse, lots of things can go wrong. Shipments may not have the right number of units in them, or they could get damaged somewhere along the supply chain. Discrepancies in the stock may arise as part of every inventory control, and need to be corrected immediately after the inventory control procedure has been finished.
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Transport operations are often divided into full load and part load and due to economies of scale, the unit costs are higher for part loads. Our customer needs several part loads delivering, so it can reduce costs by consolidating these into full loads. Then it gets all the part loads delivered to a warehouse near the suppliers, consolidates them into full loads, and pays the lower costs of full-load transport to its operations.
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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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Miscellaneous Warehouse Processes
At the end of each inventory control, the Contractor provides the Ordering Person with an inventory report which contains a list of all stock adjustments. The Ordering Person uses the report to create, by use of his/her own means, necessary value and accounting adjustments related to the stock. Let us look at some to the mislaneous warehouse processes not covered earlier.
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Types of Order Picking Methods in the Warehouse
There are many different types of picking in a warehouse and each one works as a customized solution for each business. Depending on the size of your warehouse and inventory, the manpower you have on hand, and the number of customer orders made each day, there may be certain methods that are more efficient for you than others.
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Resource Planning is the process of planning for expected workload and determining the number of resources required to complete each activity in the warehouse. There are many types of warehouse positions, and they also vary by the employer, the scale of operations and location. Discussed here are generic positions applicable to warehouse management processes.
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Warehouses may seem like a simple, straightforward concept, but they actually include a variety of different types of warehouses that all have their own niche. The type of warehousing that’s right for you depends on your specific industry, location, and needs. From private warehousing, distribution centers, and climate-controlled warehouses, there’s an option to suit every business.
