A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post that discussed receiving product into a warehouse in an efficient cost effective manner. Click here to read that post. In it I reviewed why it is so important to get your product into the warehouse correctly and get it put away in the right spot. If you accomplish that task successfully it makes the picking process much easier.
You have just been handed a paper with a list of items to go out into the warehouse and find in order to fulfill a customer’s order. Your take the list commonly called a pick ticket grab a cart, hand jack, forklift or box and off you go. Maybe you have a good idea of where things are in the warehouse which is pretty helpful and maybe you don’t. You walk to the back of the warehouse to find the first item take a correct amount off the shelf and then walk to the other end of the warehouse and get the next and so on and so on till you have pulled all the items. You have had to along the way make sure that you got the right items the right quantity. This has been done all by counting and sight. During your trip you stopped to talk to a co-worker in front of a pick bin who is also out for a stroll through the warehouse picking an order. While you’re talking you pick the item and then off you go unaware that you took the wrong product and the wrong amount because you had been talking to the other person who by the way also pulled the wrong item and quantity for their order.
This scenario and many others like it happen way too often in the warehouse. The first problem is the paper pick ticket the next is the path that this picker has to take to get the order picked and the third are the errors made. These problems and many many more exist when a warehouse operation relies on a paper driven manual system to manage the task of picking orders.
In my next post I will review the tremendous gains that an electronic warehouse management solution provides a business in the area of picking orders
