Knowledge Base

There are many considerations to take into account when choosing the most effective order picking strategy for pick and pack fulfillment. The two most common picking methods for high volume fulfillment are:

Zone Picking

Divide the warehouse into different zones. Each zone is responsible by a dedicated picker to minimize traffic congestion and maximize efficiency of picking by leveraging familiarity of the picker with the zone.

Wave Picking

Select a group of orders for fulfillment at a certain time of the day based on shipping date, carrier pick up time, customer priority, staff availability, stock replenishment schedule, etc.

When the shipping volume is not high, the following less complex strategies are typically used:

PIECE Picking

Each order is picked individually and sequentially by a picker. This is highly inefficient. In the worse case, two orders with identical items would require two separate pick trips.

Batch Picking

Multiple orders are picked at the same time by a picker. Usually, the pick cart has totes or bins to separate the items for each order to avoid mix up. Alternatively, the orders are sorted during packing.

Our Batch Pick API supports all four picking strategies. You have the choice of passing in a single order to the API to find shortest pick path and pick sequence based on the warehouse layout, or passing in multiple orders to have them grouped into pick batches. Pick batches are optimized with shortest pick paths to reduce the total pick time required for the orders. The API automatically supports zone picking if the warehouse layout has been marked into various zones.

For wave picking, the API usage is the same. You pass in a list of orders to the API to create optimized pick lists based on the warehouse layout. The API also provides an estimate of pick path distance to infer time required for picking so you can schedule staff and coordinate fulfillment tasks accordingly.

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