Optimising Order Picking for 2022

The order picking process of any warehouse or distribution business involves a lot of resources and planning on top of the costs, all to ensure your customers are ultimately satisfied with your operations.

Everything from global retail to small builders merchants has the same desired outcome – orders completed on time, no damage to stock and productivity costs reduced as much as possible.

Issues with warehouse picking operations can range from wrong items and quantities picked, paper-based picking and items stored in the wrong locations, resulting in them being missing from orders. Whilst some can point to human inaccuracy, it can also fall into warehouse storage equipment being ill-equipped for the task at hand.

When looking at your operations, systems can be overhauled to dramatically reduce the margin of error on picking lines and boost optimum organization for the business at the same time.

Racking and Storage

The quality and style of your storage solution are the most important factors in your overall process.

The picking process can be catered for better efficiency around products and fulfilment in the use of high quality, engineered, custom-built pallet racking systems and commercial shelving. Being able to adapt to storage needs during seasonal hikes inactivity, without the urging to hire out additional warehouse space, is essential in keeping your business costs reduced.

Having an upgraded system for storage of items built to client specification is a highly cost-effective way of saving both space and money, enabling the existing stock to fit nicely with more space on top for excess to hold until required. This will play greatly into savings as well as improving productivity within the warehouse.

Layout

As well as examining your existing industrial storage racks, there is ample opportunity to examine how to reduce travel time around the warehouse within the pick.

By examining your existing layout, there are opportunities to greatly improve zoning areas to save on time and increase picking, and that will sometimes come with a full layout change before implementing new racking solutions.

Over the years, you may have allocated smaller stock to aisle ends or separated sections of the warehouse. The opportunity to provide smaller commercial shelving units to handle these rare, smaller items into their specific part of the warehouse away from the larger picking aisles may result in increased productivity and reduced time between picks.

Between these solutions lay the best ways to reduce costs and time and increase the productivity of your staff, as well as listening to their thoughts on what can be improved.

Contact the team at Monarch Shelving today for bespoke order picking process solutions to your warehouse operations.