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How can we improve your warehouse picking quality?
How can we help your picking quality?
Are you faced with customers complaining about wrong/missing items in orders?
Is your warehouse a mess, with stock in random places with no logic as to how goods are stored?
Are your team spending too much time looking for or picking goods?
Perhaps you face none of these challenges but want a system that supports your team rather than relying on your managers to direct the operations team. Interprise can help your managers in the following ways:
- Creating locations/Bins in your warehouse
- Implementing preferred put away locations
- When picking goods, Interprise will provide your warehouse operations with a pick note with the most efficient route through the warehouse.
- If you were to add an extra layer of security, you could use a barcode scanner to scan the goods being picked.
In this blog we will uncover the ways in which we can assist your business in its order processing. We have multiple ways of working, so it’s best to outline your workflows and understand how Interprise Suite can be absorbed into it.
Our customers process somewhere between 20-100 orders a day, all the way to 1500 orders per day. We have routines to fit a variety of businesses.
If you have trouble outlining your workflows, speak with one of our consultants today at sales@apexit.co.uk or 0161 387 7140
Creating locations/Bins in your warehouse
What is a bin/location? A location in your warehouse is exactly that; it’s a small part of your warehouse which has been sectioned off a coded with a location name. Some examples of locations include:
A, A1, A2, A3, B, B1, B2, B3 and so on.
Creating locations and coding them allows you to create the basis for better organisation on where you are putting goods. It will also help you to improve communication amongst your staff on where goods are located/stored. Let’s take a look at what this looks like:
You can do this without Interprise Suite, correct. But if your current software doesn’t have software capabilities, your systems will not reflect reality clearly – so when your warehouse manager is off and you receive goods from suppliers, your warehouse ops might not know where to put them. Interprise Suite will give your team that information.
As an example, this warehouse is configured with the stages of the order processing, as well as where specific items will go:
Implementing put away locations
Preferred put away locations start at the item level, so when you are creating items in Interprise, you will have the option to choose a preferred location.
For example, we can see that on item 19” SVGA colour monitor, the preferred pick and put away location is in Location 1.
This puts all of your team on the same hymn sheet as to where stock is located, where it can be found for picking, and where it must be put away once received.
On this Goods Received Note (GRN) at the bottom you can see that Location 1 is where this item is usually stored.
When selecting goods that have been put on sales orders, you will be able to see where the item is located on the picking note:
You can have put away notes exactly like your picking notes if required.
Having this information on your operations system, it provides your team with clarity on information for putting goods away and picking goods.
Creating routes through your warehouse for picking goods
If your team are taking individual sales orders, picking the goods on and bringing them to the packing area to be packed – that is one way to work.
If you are trying to scale up the number of orders you can process, you will likely need to pick multiple orders at once and have the most efficient picking routes.
This is where software can help your picking team become more efficient and process more orders per hour. Want to see how?
When printing your picking notes, you have the option to print picking notes “By Route Order”, but you can also do them in batches. This consolidates multiple orders into one picking note.
Adding additional layers of security: Barcode scanning
If you find that even after implementing better organisation in your warehouse that your pick quality is still poor – you need to implement a barcode scanning system.
It sounds complicated, but it’s rather straightforward. You would simply have Interprise Suite running on a portable device with a Bluetooth scanner. This means for all the goods you are selecting in the warehouse, to check it off you would have to first scan the location, scan the item, confirm the quantity to move, then move on to the next item.
This moves into our Warehouse Management module, if you would like to discuss this, then email us on sales@apexit.co.uk – barcode scanning is a sure as a way to improve your pick results.
We hope that in this blog we have outlined some of the ways in which you can better manage your warehouse. As you grow, you cannot simply glance around the warehouse to check stock and know where it is, your premises will increase in size and the number of items in your warehouse will undoubtedly grow. It is best to know what is possible from a systems perspective – that way much of the heavy lifting can be done by the software.
We have articles on our Knowledge Base which explore this in more detail:
Fancy a conversation? Call or email us at sales@apexit.co.uk or 0161 387 7140.
