Selecting several goods from around your warehouse and making them available at the end of your process for shipping direct to a customer can always be improved by taking the advice of warehouse design consultants. Order picking systems can add too much time delay and cost for your service, which may cause competitors to look elsewhere for their business.
Keeping Your Customers Satisfied
Order Picking Systems can become extremely labor-intensive and when your costs increase, so do your charges to the customer. Where you cannot increase the dollars that your customer pays, how can you rearrange your organization to reduce your expenses?
Gathering together most or all the items that are most likely to be purchased together by customers can decrease the delay time as a picking operator can select from a small area within your warehouse. Nevertheless, this is not always practical. Detailed data will help you answer this question.
Your designer will be able to assess your storage and picking areas and assess how they combine with your material handling systems which help you move the products from the storage area to where they are picked.
Some warehouse organizations favor moving a variety of orders at the same time and delivering the goods to specific picking days, where a picking operator can collate the items required for one customer and then move onto the next. The downside of this idea is that the operator may spend time wondering when items are going to arrive.
Are Multiple Conveyors the Best Answer?
Some experts suggest that a different arrangement for the sorting system can be advantageous to some warehouse operations. In this example, the products are introduced to a conveyor within the storage area and head towards the picker to complete a customer’s order. This ensures that the picking operator wastes less time collecting individual items to complete the order.
Another variation includes similar facilities with areas for picking, storage, replenishment and the employee who sorts the final collection together. With this idea, there are multiple picking zones and as the operator completes picking the items from the storage area, it is move through to a conveyor belt, taking the order direct to the shipping area.
Order picking systems vary considerably with a wide range of possibilities, all at a cost. With your financial allowance known, design consultants will listen to your requirements and provide a solution that is unique to your business and within your budget.
