Find the missing pieces in order fulfillment

Sometimes, closing a few gaps can lead to dramatic improvements in order fulfillment productivity.

By Bob Trebilcock, Editor at Large -- Modern Materials Handling, 7/31/2007

Even warehouse and distribution center managers who do their homework can miss a thing or two when they implement a new solution. Identifying those missing pieces can lead to big productivity gains, says Sam Flanders, president of Warehouse Management Consultants.

And, nowhere is that more true than in piece-picking operations. That’s the first place Flanders looks when he walks through a DC for the first time. “If you ask me where the gold is usually hidden in a DC, it’s piece picking,” says Flanders. “Any time it’s taking longer than 15 seconds between picks, I see an opportunity for improvement.”

Case in point: A few years ago, Flanders was approached by a manager who wanted a new DC because he had outgrown his existing facility. When Flanders asked if he could first look at the existing operations, the manager insisted they really needed a new warehouse. “I finally coerced him into letting me observe what they were already doing,” says Flanders. After a couple of days on the floor, he learned two things: 

1. The company really had done its homework, making improvements like implementing a batch picking and sortation solution that streamlined the steps required to fill an order. 

2. It took more than a minute to pick an item. Flanders also discovered that down the line, order sortation was a bottleneck. 

“The storage area was disorganized, which meant it took too long for an order picker to find the right product,” says Flanders. “And when they picked a product it simply went into a tote that was sent to the sortation area, where four sorters had to figure out what pieces went with what order.”

The solution: “First, we reorganized the storage area so pickers could quickly and easily find what they were looking for,” says Flanders. “We also put in a label printer. That way, pickers could print and apply a label with the order number for each piece they picked. That allowed sorters to quickly figure out where to sort the item.”

The result: Not only did order picking productivity improved dramatically, the DC was able to reduce the number of employees assigned to the sortation area from four to one. “That was two years ago,” Flanders says. “The last time I talked to the DC manager, he thought they might get another three to five years of that existing facility just because of a few simple changes.”