Picking

Of all warehouse processes, order picking tends to get the most attention. It's just the nature of distribution and fulfillment that you generally have more outbound transactions than inbound transactions, and the labor associated with the outbound transactions is likely a big piece of the total warehouse labor budget. Another reason for the high level of importance placed on order picking operations is its direct connection to customer satisfaction. The ability to quickly and accurately process customer orders has become an essential part of doing business.

The methods for order picking vary greatly and the level of difficulty in choosing the best method for your operation will depend on the type of operation you have. The characteristics of the product being handled, total number of transactions, total number of orders, picks per order, quantity per pick, picks per SKU, total number of SKUs, value-added processing such as private labeling, and whether you are handling piece pick, case pick, or full-pallet loads are all factors that will affect your decision on a method for order picking. Many times a combination of picking methods is needed to handle diverse product and order characteristics.

In this Tabaka Print House case, we have around 1500 commercial SKUs. The orders taken from a customer does not have an amount of a pallet. In printing industry the orders per SKU are usually taken as case by case. Sometimes this situation is gained by forcing the customer to buy more or less to reach a case size.

For Tabaka Print House, the most suitable order picking approach is case picking system. Case picking system describes systems where individual cases are picked. It has a moderate number of SKUs and higher picks per SKUs. Here two distinct case picking can be used. One of them is Basic case-picking method. case-pick operations will have the product stored in pallet rack or in bulk in floor locations. The simplest picking method is to use a hand pallet jack (or motorized pallet truck) and pick cases out of bulk floor locations however many operations will find that going to very narrow aisle (VNA) pallet racking and using man-up order selectors or turret trucks will provide high storage density and high pick rates. The second one is Zone picking, If you do have a case pick operation where you have a large number of SKUs, and orders with small quantities per SKU, or where you have enough cases per order per zone to fill