Streamline Your Order Picking to Boost Productivity and Drive Sales
Your warehouse can become chaotic if your order picking process isn’t streamlined and efficient. As the orders start to roll in, your company wastes valuable time, money, and resources through mismanaged order picking processes. A boost in order productivity is a boost in sales.
Looking for a few tips and tricks to help you whip your order picking productivity into shape?
- Combine Trips
Picking multiple orders at once can be a good use of your time and energy. You can either have your team group pick, or batch pick and then sort through the items. Either way, your team saves small amounts of time and energy that begin to really add up. If you decided to implement group picking, assign each order its own picking tote and then use a mobile warehousing system to direct the picking team to the correct tote. If you implement batch picking, a team of pickers picks all the items for batch order and then those items are later sorted.
Picking more than one order does pose the risk of mixing things up, but a high-quality warehouse management system helps eliminate that worry.
- Revamp The Pickup Line
Take an honest look at your pickup line process and see where improvements can be made. When pickers are asked to make several quick decisions about order while on the pickup line, things can start to pile up and chaos can unfold. Take an inventory of your pickup line process, and streamline the process with the help of mobile warehouse systems. When you put a solid process in place, employees aren’t forced to make snap decisions that hold up the line. Train your employees on the proper pickup line process and teach them how to navigate minor issues without holding up the line. Proper training, coupled with a good warehouse management software, can keep your pickup line running smoothly.
- Skip The SKU Mix
When you mix multiple SKUs in one bin, your order picking productivity dramatically drops. Effective warehouse management systems will tell you that the best way to speed up the picking process is to separate SKUs. If your pickers are spending lots of time rummaging through bins looking for items with the correct SKU, you are losing time, energy and money by the minute. A mobile warehouse management system can help you get items into the correct bin and divide them by SKU. This mobile system can also help pickers quickly locate where the items with the correct SKUs are. By taking a little extra time to sort things out correctly in the first place, you’ll save lots of time later when your staff needs to start picking.
Improve your warehousing processes with ContractERP’s warehouse management systems. These systems can help you organize and improve every aspect of your warehouse process, including order picking.
