, Retail
A picker in a small warehouse can cover eight or ten miles in a shift. You are paying for every one of those miles at the same rate you pay for the part where they actually touch the goods, and the touching is a small fraction of the time.
That is the whole of pick efficiency in one sentence. The cost is travel. Everything worth doing is about reducing distance, reducing the number of trips, or making each trip carry more.
Walking is the cost, not picking
Time a few orders properly, with a stopwatch rather than an impression. Split it into travel, searching, picking, packing and paperwork. In most operations that have never looked, travel and searching between them take well over half.
Searching is the easier of the two to remove. Every location needs a label that matches what the system calls it, in a format a person can read at a distance. Locations that exist in someone's head cost you a few seconds hundreds of times a day, and they make holiday cover impossible.
Then look at the route. A pick list printed in the order the customer typed the items is a route designed by a stranger. Sorting the list into location sequence, so the picker walks a single path through the building rather than back and forth, is usually the largest single improvement available and it is a software setting rather than a project.
Slot by velocity, not by product family
Almost every warehouse starts out organised by supplier or by product family, because that is how the goods arrive. It is the wrong arrangement for picking.
Slot by how often something is picked. The lines that appear most often in orders go closest to the packing bench and at the heights that do not require bending or a ladder, roughly between knee and shoulder. Slow movers go high, low and far away. If a tenth of your lines appear in most of your orders, and that is common, then concentrating those in a compact area near the bench cuts a large share of the walking immediately.
Three refinements that are worth the effort:
- Review the fast-mover list quarterly. Velocity changes with season and with range, and a slotting plan from two years ago is now roughly random.
- Keep bulk stock and pick faces separate. The picker takes from a small pick face at a sensible height, and replenishment tops it up from a pallet elsewhere, on its own schedule.
- Put the heavy things where they do not have to be lifted far or high, which is a safety decision as much as an efficiency one.
Batch, zone and the point at which it is worth it
Single-order picking is one walk per order. It is simple, it is easy to get right, and it becomes expensive as volume rises.
Batch picking means collecting the same item for several orders in one visit, then sorting to orders at the bench. It cuts travel sharply when orders are small and lines repeat, which is typical of ecommerce. It adds a sortation step, and sortation is where errors are introduced, so it needs a physical discipline: a trolley with numbered totes, one order per tote, scan at the point of sortation.
Zone picking splits the building into areas with a picker in each, passing the order along. It only pays when you have enough people that they are getting in each other's way, which for most small operations is later than expected.
The order of adoption is usually route sequencing first, then slotting, then batch picking, then anything involving conveyors or automation. Each of the first three costs almost nothing and gives back more than the last one does at small scale.
Errors are returns with a delay
A mispick does not stay in the warehouse. It becomes a customer contact, a replacement shipped at your cost, a return collected at your cost, a refund of the original carriage, and often a review that costs more than all of it. A single-digit percentage error rate sounds tolerable until you cost one incident end to end.
Scanning is the fix, and the detail is that it has to happen at the moment of picking rather than at the bench. Scanning the item into the tote catches the wrong item while the right one is still an arm's length away. Scanning at the bench catches it after the walk, which is better than nothing and much worse than the alternative.
Weight checking at the pack station is a cheap second net. If the order should weigh 840 grams and the parcel weighs 620, something is missing, and the scale knows before the customer does.
Measure pick accuracy as a rate, review the misses weekly, and look for the pattern. Errors cluster around similar-looking products stored next to each other, around sizes and colours of the same item, and around one or two locations where the labelling is ambiguous. Those are all fixable by moving things, not by asking people to concentrate harder.
The bits the HSE will ask about
A warehouse is a workplace with specific duties attached, and the Health and Safety Executive publishes guidance on most of them.
Manual handling is governed by the Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992, which require you to avoid hazardous manual handling where reasonably practicable, assess what cannot be avoided, and reduce the risk. There is no legal maximum weight, which is the most commonly believed fiction in the sector. It depends on the load, the posture, the frequency and the person.
Lift trucks fall under the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998, with lifting equipment and accessories also covered by the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998, which set out thorough examination requirements. Racking is work equipment too, and industry practice is a regular rack inspection with a competent person, with damaged beams taken out of use rather than noted for later.
Anything picked from height brings the Work at Height Regulations 2005 into play, and a ladder is permitted for short duration low risk work rather than banned, which is the other common fiction. Gangways, floor condition and temperature sit under the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, which require a reasonable temperature rather than a specific one.
Where this shows up in the game
E-commerce is one of the five free business types in Business Baron, and wholesale and logistics are part of the full game. Capacity is whatever actually delivers the work, which for a business that ships goods means the people packing them. The way you organised things at two hundred orders a week is rarely the way that works at two thousand.