Pick and Pack Best Practices

Pick and Pack warehouse processes rely on workers to pick individual items from master cartons on shelves to fulfill individual orders. It requires a high level of coordination, organization, and attention to detail. A pickers actual route through the warehouse is mapped so a moment isn’t wasted on calculation and indecision. This streamlining is actually an important aspect of pick and pack fulfillment strategies. These strategies boil down to four kinds of picking:

– Workers pick orders one at a time as they receive them and continue picking items until the entire order is complete. This kind of inventory management is best suited to only the smallest of warehouses as it is very inefficient. 

– This is better suited to larger warehouses with more traffic as workers will pick for orders like in piece picking, but they will be picking for multiple orders at the same time. 

– This divides a large warehouse into zones and workers will pick items from their assigned zones only. Orders that require fulfillment from multiple zones will be passed from one zone to the next. Although clearly more complicated, zone picking is more efficient than piece picking or batch picking for large warehouses. 

– This form combines elements of all three. Workers are assigned to zones, pick only from those zones, and do so in batches thus fulfilling multiple orders simultaneously.