Pick-to-light revitalizes

Vitamin distributor Vitacost increased throughput 33% switching from paper to pick-to-light.

By Noël P. Bodenburg, Managing Editor -- Modern Materials Handling, 1/1/2007

A lot has changed in the 12 years since Vitacost joined the online marketplace. Now the Web accounts for 90% of its thousands of weekly orders for vitamins, homeopathic remedies and related products. In fact, business was so good, the company needed a faster picking system than the paper one in place.

Today, a pick-to-light system (Innovative Picking Technologies, 262-567-6525) has increased throughput 33%. In addition to being faster, pickers are more accurate and accountable, too.

"Using the paper system, we were able to handle 1,000 orders a day," says John Arnst, vice president of Vitacost. "Now with the pick-to-light system tied into our warehouse management system (WMS), we can easily handle 6,000 orders daily with the capacity to move even more with the same size crew."

All 6,000 stock keeping units are brought to the picking line on gravity-fed racks. Each picking location is identified by a light bar. An order's shipping box enters a picking zone on a conveyor running down the center of the pick zone.

A fixed-position scanner reads the bar code label on the box. This data is sent to the WMS which then instructs the pick-to-light software which light bars need to be illuminated in the zone.

Each light bar contains a display that shows the number of items to pick from that location. Workers then pick the appropriate number of items and press a "task complete" button on the bar. This indicates that they have finished with that pick and are ready to advance the box to the next pick location.

After all items are picked in a zone, the box is advanced to the next zone on the conveyor.

When an order has been completely picked, the box moves to a staging area. There, the bar code label on the box is scanned, and the WMS notified it is ready for shipment. Final packaging occurs in the shipping area prior to loading on trucks.