The Zone Picking Best Practice to Improve Order Picking Productivity

This next best practice is about the warehouse zone picking process. The way this works is if your picking involves going to multiple areas, multiple isles of bin locations, and you are picking from different bin locations. This process is about eliminating all the unnecessary walking, and of course we all know the more you pick, the more you can ship, the more you ship, the more you invoice, the more you can get paid. This results in more revenue for the company, more revenue for the distribution center and everyone is happy. If you can eliminate the time that is spent by people on walking and instead have them pick all the time then that becomes efficient. If you have one long isle or multiple isles you could divide those isles into multiple zones. So what would happen is and typically this works well with a MHE (material handling equipment) wherein the box comes to the zone and the person stays in the zone all the time.

The zone could be a confined area where they are not walking so much and staying in that zone and staying closer to the bin location. When a carton arrives into their zone, they pick their product and put it in the carton and scan the carton. Then they know the products that needs to be put in the carton and they go to the bin location. In the bin location they had to take that product and put it in the carton and scan the carton again. It tells that they fulfilled their picks that they need to perform in their zone. The operator just stands there instead of walking and going to the location, the cartons comes to the operator and they scan, picks products, drops it off and then moves to the next carton and scans the next carton or tote.

zone-picking-best-practiceSometimes it could be some kind of a bulk picking where they are picking for the tote and scans the tote and then goes picks. When they are picking they are scanning the location as well because the inventory in that location has to be decremented and then the inventory going on to the cart and tote has to be incremented. They are doing this all day just standing in that location which means they are not spending time, wasting time walking so that adds to their efficiency.

They are not spending time on moving the product as nowadays it is done by the material handling equipment. The robots that are now being implemented to move the cartons. The beauty of the robots is that it is configurable. Now imagine that you had one long material handling equipment mean with a roller and long rails. The rollers move these boxes, and they come to the zone and you are in that zone. Then there are pickers in the other zone named zone 1, zone 2, zone 3, zone 4 and zone 5. When it comes to your zone to drop off the box and if you fulfill the order, then it goes to the next zone. The next person fulfills the order like that they are doing it that works great. But imagine your business changed and you have to change this layout which means you have to completely lift these long rail of rollers and then put something else that’s where the robot comes. It’s easy to program the robots, change the configuration of the robots, so the robots can instead of going in a particular path it can go in some other optimized path.

It’s all very flexible and that’s the beauty of the robots. It’s a zone picking instead of it’s coming through the conveyor the long rails with rollers it comes with the robots. As the operator is not walking and just need to perform picking and dropping off the product to the carton the efficiency gets increased. So that’s the fundamental concept of zone picking and especially if your DC is very large and there is one pick that is all the way on the other corner of the DC then you want to think about zone picking process. We don’t have control over how the order arrived for picking so that’s something to think about zone picking. It might work or might not work and typically where I have seen were lot of successes are not from small SKUs  and big SKUs.

It is more efficient on medium size SKUs that are too heavy for the people to handle. It with an office retailer, that’s where it worked well. There were some kind of automation where the cartons where diverted to the zone only if there are picks in that zone. If there are no picks in that zone carton would just got to one, three, five and, if there are picks then it will go into the zone so that also save some time. It was planned like that because there is no point in diverting a carton if there is no picks, so the person does not have to scan and find if there are no picks. It adds to the efficiency, and that’s something to think about zone picking. If it is suitable for your facility, and justifies your investment in the material handling equipment and all that taking into account, all the walking that your people are doing and the labor cost associated with it then zone picking can be implemented without any second thoughts. Please share your comments in the section below.

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01
Oct 2019
By Puga Sankara380 Comments
Author:
Puga Sankara
About:
Puga Sankara is the Founder, CEO of Smart Gladiator LLC. Smart Gladiator designs, builds, and delivers market-leading mobile technology for retailers, distributors, and 3PL service providers. So far, Smart Gladiator LoadProof has been used to ship, receive, and scan more than 100 million boxes. SG LoadProof is a patent pending Centralized Enterprise Photo/Video Document System on Cloud for Supply Chain. SG LP is built on the fact that photos & videos are vital docs as important as POs/SOs/Legal Contracts/Fulfillment Orders that reside in ERP/WMS/TMS systems, that serve as compelling, conclusive, unequivocal proof of crucial, critical, vital operations executed in Supply Chain within/across orgs when fulfilling customer orders as well as meeting contractual obligations between orgs as merchandise is transferred between different parties that partake in Supply Chain functions & operations. And these photos/videos data should not be stored in someone’s Smartphone or Email Inbox or in their personal/work Computer, but should be stored in a Centralized Enterprise system, where such data can be pushed into super-fast, stored securely, accessible to all stake holders (CFO/Sales Reps/Customer Support/AR/AP) in an org, as well as facilitates super-fast retrieval/sharing. LP is an Enterprise System of record for Photo/Video docs & is as important as an ERP which is an enterprise system of record for POs, SOs, Legal Contracts between parties etc. that have huge legal ramifications, also as important as a WMS (Warehouse Management System) that hold indispensable shipment & fulfillment data on orders. Like how Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat etc. have evolved into social media platforms/systems that enable individuals to showcase their beauty/pretty clothes/lovely cosmetics/hep coolness etc., LoadProof is an Enterprise system that holds similar photos/videos, but for a different reason, not for show off, but to serve as compelling, conclusive, unequivocal & indisputable system of record and proof that can be presented even in the court of law, when there is a dispute between parties while they execute many facets of the Supply Chain functions & operations. SG LoadProof is also an Enterprise System of Record for Photos, videos and any other digital documents for your Supply Chain Network. A system of record (SOR) or source system of record (SSoR) is a data management term for an information storage system (commonly implemented on a computer system running a database management system) that is the authoritative data source for a given data element or piece of information. The need to identify systems of record can become acute in organizations where management information systems have been built by taking output data from multiple source systems, re-processing this data, and then re-presenting the result for new business use. In these cases, multiple information systems may disagree about the same piece of information. These disagreements may stem from semantic differences, differences in opinion, use of different sources, and differences in the timing of the extract, transform, and load processes that create the data they report against, or may simply be the result of bugs. The integrity and validity of any data set is open to question when there is no traceable connection to a good source, such as a known System of Record. Where the integrity of the data is vital, if there is an agreed system of record, the data element must either be linked to, or extracted directly from it. In other cases, the provenance and estimated data quality should be documented. The “system of record” approach is a good fit for environments where both: 1. there is a single authority over all data consumers, and 2. all consumers have similar needs Here, LoadProof is the System of Record for pictures and videos for all the entities in Supply chain who uses pictures and videos to track using any Supply Chain System infrastructure. 1. LoadProof provides accurate, thorough, complete, and latest information in pictures and videos related to any entity in the Supply chain that is tracked. 2. LoadProof is the single authority on pictures and videos related to any entity in the Supply Chain that is tracked 3. LoadProof doesn’t let any external system to copy the records being stored in it, which eliminates the data being duplicated in multiple places to preserve the data integrity and credibility. 4. LoadProof has a secured login procedure which lets only users with select level access to view the data and modify the records which helps in maintaining LoadProof is becoming the Industry Standard System for Photo & Video Docs for Supply Chain Smart Gladiator is located in ATDC - Advanced Tech Dev Center (tech Incubator) in Georgia Institute of Tech. Click for a demo - https://loadproof.com/apply Puga is a supply chain technology professional with more than 25 years of experience in deploying capabilities in the logistics and supply chain domain. His prior roles involved managing complicated mission-critical programs driving revenue numbers, rolling out a multitude of capabilities involving more than a dozen systems, and managing a team of 30 to 50 personnel across multiple disciplines and departments in large corporations such as Hewlett Packard. He has deployed WMS for more than 30 distribution centers in his role as a senior manager with Manhattan Associates. He has also performed process analysis walk-throughs for more than 50 distribution centers for WMS process design and performance analysis review, optimizing processes for better productivity and visibility through the supply chain. Size of these DCs varied from 150,000 to 1.2 million SQFT. Puga Sankara has an MBA from Georgia Tech. He can be reached at puga@smartgladiator.com or visit the company at www.smartgladiator.com. Also follow him at www.pugasankara.com. [Read More]
More articles by: Puga Sankara

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