Of the four basic phases of the warehousing process: receiving, storage, picking, and shipping, the third one causes the most problems. Order picking significantly affects the level of service provided to the external or internal customer who is the recipient of deliveries from the warehouse.
Among the many factors that can influence the actual level of services provided by a warehouse, the most important criteria for evaluating performance include:
• timeliness of execution
• compliance of assortment items with the order
• compliance of the issued quantity of individual assortment items with the order
• expected form of the unit load (weight, dimensions, method of securing and labeling, carrier used).
Assuming:
– the transfer of complete information from the customer to the warehouse without errors and delays,
– ensuring the availability of the ordered assortment through proper inventory management, poor ratings according to individual criteria indicate problems occurring during the picking process. Most problems are related to employee errors, which have very diverse origins.
Human errors can be influenced by, among other things:
• haste caused by pressure from those waiting for goods to be released from the warehouse or related to the remuneration system
• long walking distances during order picking
• difficulties in finding specific assortment items
• incorrect, illegible, or hard-to-reach packaging labels
• similarity of different goods located next to each other
• poor work organization
• picking technology that is burdensome for employees
• poor employee training
• low employee experience associated with high turnover.
Currently, in warehouses that must meet the requirements of supply chains, the following trends are observed:
• increasing the number of assortment items in stock
• increasing the frequency of deliveries and shipments
• introducing product batch tracking
• fragmentation of shipments and deliveries due to:
– a decrease in the average quantity of goods per order line,
– a greater share of heterogeneous unit loads and collective packaging instead of homogeneous ones,
– an increase in the number of assortment items in a heterogeneous unit load.
It should be recalled here that homogeneous unit loads are considered to be those in which the load contains only one batch of one assortment item. Accordingly, heterogeneous unit loads are all those created from at least two batches or assortment items.
Problems with picking and forming heterogeneous unit loads are not related solely to human work. They also result from:
• the number of items in the unit load
• the picked quantity of individual goods
• the physical form of the packaging (dimensions and shape)
• the hierarchy of packaging (unit packaging, collective packaging, layer, pallet unit load)
• the weight and properties of the goods (state of matter, compressive strength, fragility).
The listed features and the increasingly implemented FEFO (First Expired First Out) principle influence the order of picking and the final form of the unit load, which should be formed in a way that ensures the durability of its shape, dimensions, contents, and protection against damage.
The quality of the process of picking and forming issued unit loads can be influenced, among other things, by:
• improving processes carried out by warehouse employees
• changing the structure of unit loads (orders)
• automating processes.
Until now, in commercial enterprises, the impact of the ordered quantity of individual assortment items and their form (unit and collective packaging) on the process of picking and forming a unit load in the warehouse is rarely noticed. This is generally due to a lack of knowledge on this subject among employees responsible for sales. Sales departments buckle under market pressure, accepting orders for increasingly smaller quantities of goods. Maintaining or increasing sales levels then causes an increase in:
• costs of handling an average order
• the number of documents exchanged with customers and internally
• activities related to picking and shipping
• transport costs.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 1/2009.