Warehouse Management
Travel is commonly more than half of pick time, and in a badly laid out building it is well past that.
Why It Matters
Time a picker for an hour with a stopwatch and split it into travel, search and handling. In most warehouses travel is more than half, search is uncomfortably large, and the actual act of picking the item is the smallest slice.
Paper pick lists build in transcription error. Someone reads a code, walks, picks something close enough, ticks a line, and hands a sheet to an office that keys it in an hour later. Every one of those steps can be wrong and none of them is checked.
Booked in against the expected purchase order, scanned at the dock, with short and over quantities flagged and inspection stock sent to quarantine.
The system names the bin from putaway rules on velocity, weight, height and remaining capacity. The driver scans the pallet and scans the bin, so the location is confirmed rather than remembered.
Minimum levels on pick face bins raise replenishment tasks in the background. Bulk pallets come down before the bin runs dry, so a picker never arrives at an empty face and has to go hunting.
Orders released under the chosen strategy, pick lists sorted into aisle order, every pick scanned, then pack verification against the order line, cartonisation and a packing note at the bench.
Carrier label and consignment raised, goods staged by carrier and loading time, the day's consignments closed into a signed manifest, and proof of delivery returned against the original order.
Zone structure, a four part address scheme that sorts into pick sequence, bin capacities, and a printed label plan for aisles, racks and faces.
Velocity, weight and height rules per item group, mixed or dedicated bin policy per zone, and minimum levels that trigger pick face replenishment.
Discrete, batch, zone or wave set up per order type, with release rules, pick sequencing and a consolidation step where zone picking needs one.
Receive, putaway, replenish, pick, pack and despatch on handheld devices, each step confirming bin, item and quantity, with task interleaving turned on.
Pack verification, cartonisation, packing notes, carrier labels and consignment manifests, plus proof of delivery returning against the sales order.
Lines picked per hour by person and by zone, dock to stock time, replenishment lateness and pick accuracy, reported so the measure is fair to every zone.
Before any configuration we time a picker, follow a goods receipt and watch a despatch cut-off.
A stockroom with a few hundred SKUs and two people does not need zones, waves and scanners. If that is you, we will say so and fix the labelling instead.
The location scheme is the hardest thing to change later, because it is printed on the racking.
Scanners and clean putaway rules come before wave planning and slotting analytics.
Pickers train on the real building with the real labels and the real devices, not on a demo database.
We build this on ERPNext, Odoo or SAP and have no reason to push the one that bills the most. The depth of warehouse function differs, and we will say where.
Inventory management answers what you hold, what it is worth and when to buy more. It owns the item master, units of measure, batch and serial, valuation and the stock ledger. Warehouse management answers where the stock physically sits and how it gets moved. It owns bins, putaway rules, pick strategies, packing, despatch and the scanner in the picker's hand. Plenty of businesses run inventory well with no warehouse module at all, because a stockroom does not need directed work. Nobody runs a warehouse module well on top of an inventory master that is already wrong.
If you have more than a few hundred SKUs, or any product where two variants look alike, yes. Scanning is the single highest-return change in most warehouses because it removes transcription. Paper picking usually lands somewhere in the mid nines for line accuracy, which sounds fine until you count the credit notes. Scanning at the point of action takes that to the high nines and it holds there without supervision. A warehouse running on paper and memory will not get accurate stock however good the ERP behind it is, because the ERP only ever sees what somebody chose to type in.
It follows from order profile, not from sophistication. Discrete order picking, one picker one order, suits low volume and bulky multi-line orders and is the easiest to train. Batch picking, one trip for many orders of the same item, suits high volume single-line orders and is the biggest single win for e-commerce. Zone picking with consolidation suits a large building where travel across the whole floor is the problem, at the cost of a consolidation step that needs managing. Wave picking suits operations working to carrier cut-off times.
A rough threshold: multiple aisles, a few thousand active SKUs, or picking accuracy that customers have already complained about. Hit any one of those and directed work starts paying back quickly. Below it, a single-room stockroom with a few hundred SKUs and two people who know where everything is does not need zones, waves and scanners. Imposing them costs money, slows the team down and buys nothing. We will tell you if you are in that group, and the honest answer is often to tidy the location labelling and leave the rest alone for another two years.
Yes, and the mechanics are straightforward: each site has its own zones, bins and putaway rules, stock transfers move goods between them with in-transit visibility, and allocation rules decide which site serves which order. The part that trips people up is not the software. It is agreeing who owns a shortage when two sites could have fulfilled the order, and whether a site manager can refuse a transfer request. Settle that before configuration, because the system will simply enforce whatever rule you give it.
Through carrier integration at the pack bench. The packed carton's weight and dimensions go to the carrier, the carrier returns a tracking number and a compliant label that prints on the spot, and the day's consignments close into a manifest the driver signs for. Proof of delivery comes back against the original sales order, so customer service can answer a where-is-my-order question without phoning anyone. Most mainstream carriers have a usable interface. Smaller regional hauliers often do not, and for those a manifest file and a printed label is still the practical answer.
Related
The other services in this section, and related pages from TCB Infotech.
One uncomfortable truth before you book: warehouse software directs work, it does not do the work.
