Typ­i­cal ware­house chal­lenge — Picking

In our logis­tics blog, we will ana­lyze the typ­i­cal ware­house challenges.

Finnish – A lan­guage of neg­a­tiv­i­ty? Well, prob­a­bly not. Nev­er­the­less, our lan­guage con­tains proverbs that tend to under­mine or ques­tion new things and the imple­men­ta­tion of new ideas.

Many of us Finns know a say­ing that can be rough­ly trans­lat­ed as “An old trick is bet­ter than a bag of new ones”. Still today, there are many orga­ni­za­tions that have old mis­con­cep­tions of the days past, and dur­ing my career, I have had to hear the sen­tence “This is how we’ve always done it” sev­er­al times.

Logis­tics, how­ev­er, is going through a major par­a­digm shift. This means that stick­ing to old ways of doing things can be a crit­i­cal risk for orga­ni­za­tions. There­fore, some com­pa­nies have already stepped out as pio­neers by renew­ing their entire logis­ti­cal chain and gen­er­al way of thinking.

Nev­er­the­less, many orga­ni­za­tions still find that their logis­tics process­es are derived from the 90’s – an era where tech­nol­o­gy was only first being intro­duced to warehouses.

To step into the shoes of your cus­tomer for a moment, it is easy to see why logis­tics is among one of the most val­ued aspects in a cus­tomer jour­ney. Let’s use the fol­low­ing as an example.

Think of the dai­ly deci­sions you would make as a cus­tomer and ask your­self the ques­tion: What are the fac­tors most impor­tant when buy­ing a prod­uct? I believe the answer you would give your­self is at least, price and speed of delivery.

I argue that the ease of pur­chase, deliv­er­ing a promised prod­uct, and the speed of deliv­ery are the most impor­tant aspects for cus­tomers: both as end users and resellers.

Let’s dive deep­er into the logis­tics process­es. Let’s go into the ware­house and see what they do on a dai­ly basis. Goods are being received, picked and dis­patched. Based on my expe­ri­ence, the most impor­tant aspect in the func­tion of logis­tics is to make the pick­ing pro­ce­dure a smooth part of the order-to-ship­ping process in the ware­house. There­fore, in this blog, I will pri­mar­i­ly focus on pick­ing process in ware­house using exam­ples I have expe­ri­enced first-hand.

As a start­ing point, the col­lec­tion of dif­fer­ent items must be made so sim­ple that the pick­ing can be per­formed by any ware­house employ­ee with­out pos­sess­ing in-depth knowl­edge on the items to be collected.

I have worked in a ware­house, where to pick the right items, you had to know the prod­ucts very well. Often, the col­lec­table items had their indi­vid­ual addi­tion­al com­po­nents to be col­lect­ed with only a men­tion in the pick­ing list, if that at all. One can make the point that the col­lec­tor must be also a prod­uct expert to know all the addi­tion­al parts that need to be picked up for a cer­tain delivery.

To go even fur­ther, many ware­hous­es still use old-school paper pick­ing lists where the item pick­ing is car­ried out using a print­ed list.

With these print­ed pick­ing lists, col­lect­ed items are first hand marked on the paper and only then man­u­al­ly input into the ware­house man­age­ment sys­tem. This labo­ri­ous process will mit­i­gate all the real-time ben­e­fits of a ware­house man­age­ment sys­tem as you can­not see the actu­al process tak­ing place live.

I can tell you, with­out exag­ger­a­tion, that often­times these print­ed pick­ing lists went miss­ing and a lot of time was wast­ed try­ing to recov­er them. Talk about time sav­ings then.

A com­mon prac­tice at ware­hous­es used to be so that the most dif­fi­cult deliv­er­ies of the day would be back­logged to col­lect the eas­i­est ship­ping items first. Nonethe­less, all the pick­ing lists had to be gone through dur­ing the day mean­ing that at the end of the day, there was huge rush try­ing to pick the most dif­fi­cult items before ship­ping com­pa­nies came to receive the parcels.

Rush, lack of prod­uct knowl­edge and incor­rect shelf loca­tion also pro­duce col­lec­tion mis­takes in ware­hous­es. If the ware­house sys­tem does not have all the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion for pick­ing, the ware­house work­ers need to oper­ate on their mem­o­ry and accu­mu­lat­ed prod­uct knowledge.

Mis­takes equal a lot of time spend cor­rect­ing them. Addi­tion­al work done to com­plete incom­plete orders or to han­dle cus­tomer returns are a huge expense for orga­ni­za­tions. Nat­u­ral­ly, more­over, incom­plete or wrong ship­ments dam­age your rep­u­ta­tion. Mis­takes made dur­ing pick­ing, there­fore, are time con­sum­ing, cost­ly and decrease cus­tomer satisfaction.

I have been for­tu­nate enough to see in prac­tice how the intro­duc­tion of real-time ware­house man­age­ment sys­tem rev­o­lu­tion­ized the pick­ing process. With new devices and a ded­i­cat­ed inter­face, the process was sim­pli­fied, and items were logged into the sys­tem auto­mat­i­cal­ly and immediately.

Nat­u­ral­ly, there is an invest­ment to be made when upgrad­ing your ware­house man­age­ment sys­tem. Even though you might be able to pur­chase a fan­cy sports car with the price of the upgrade, the upgrade will pay itself back in the course of only a few months. The errors made in pick­ing dropped down to only a third of the orig­i­nal amount while ware­house employ­ees’ work sat­is­fac­tion and per­for­mance were dra­mat­i­cal­ly improved. Addi­tion­al­ly, the upgrade led to a decrease in returns and the ware­house was able to meet more of its ship­ment targets.

Deliv­ery pick­ing and its relat­ed func­tion­al­i­ties are of the essence in logis­tics. When pick­ing items is effi­cient and error­less, derived costs sav­ings can be fur­ther invest­ed into logis­tics R&D, for instance.

We have devel­oped a ware­house mobi­liza­tion solu­tion, that replaces bar­code read­ers and sim­pli­fies the dai­ly work in ware­house. Read more about the solu­tion here.

Con­tact Information:
Satu Laisi
Chief Ser­vice Officer
satu.​laisi@​isletgroup.​fi
+358 40 574 1264

#logis­tics #ware­house #pick­ing #change #Islet­Group