Your process of picking and packing is one most basic task for running any functional business. If you get this wrong, then you will lose money as well as customers.
By getting it right, you will be able to streamline all your order fulfillment to increase your profit.
What is this pick and pack?
Pulling the inventory from your warehouse for boxes is picking process while packing will be the gathering and then packaging all these items for shipping to the customer.
This process of picking and packing is a set of tools and procedures that your workers use for fulfilling all customer orders efficiently.
What are various types of picking and packing processes?
You can find the following 4 distinct types of picking and packing processes.
- Discrete order picking
This process is preferred mostly by small businesses. It works as follows:
- You receive two orders
- For first-order pick and pack the items
- Then pick and pack for second-order
- Batch picking
Here instead of completing one order at one time, here it is gathering process of one batch at a time.
- Wave picking
In the wave picking process it blends discretely as well as batch picking together.
- Zone picking
Here different employees are assigned to separate zones within the warehouse and picking items only located in the specific zone.
Following are five tips to optimize this process of picking and packing.
- Design warehouse for efficiency
By designing your warehouse properly for efficient picking can dramatically cut down your time to collect items for your orders.
- Keep warehouse well-organized
- Organize every area neatly in your warehouse
- Maintain clean floors
- Ensure all supplies that packers need well organized.
- While receiving inventory put items in the same place for easy picking.
- WMS for picking easily
You must implement a warehouse management system called WMS for picking items that are listed in proper order for picker to find them.
- Double-check each of the order
Use one accurate software, or if you want to do it manually then you must double-check all your items before shipping.
- Keep inventory count accurately
Having an accurate inventory system, you can have optimize picking and packing process.
It will be difficult to get an accurate inventory count by using simple spreadsheets.
You should rather use barcodes on every inventory piece and perpetual inventory system for easy tracking as well as streamlined stocktaking.
