21 mistakes adding cost and killing productivity in your warehouse - #15

15.   Slow packing process

Do you have a business that requires you to pick and pack your small items into an outer carton for shipping?  These might be large B2B orders or small orders from an online B2C business.  Do you have separate picking and packing functions?  This is a common mistake as it is inefficient due to the double handling of each item.  It is handled once by the picker and then again by the packer who will usually also be responsible for performing a double check of each item as they pack it into a carton.  This is simply a waste of effort that adds no value.  According to the principles of Lean, re-packing is a waste of motion, and double checking is a waste of over-processing.

The solution is to pick to carton wherever possible so that each item is handled only once.  This is fine if your typical order size is large but will be slow if your orders are small and you have a large product range and a significant warehouse travel path to pick each small order.  To get around this problem you need to adopt multi-order picking so that you can pick many orders in each pass through the warehouse.  See mistake 14 on picking strategies for more information on how you can pick more efficiently.

Pick to carton will require you to know what size carton you need to contain the order.  A sophisticated WMS will give you this information based on the weights and measures for each item.  If you do not have this then you will need an experienced operator to assess the carton requirements or simply have a supply of different sized flat cartons on the picking trolley to select from once the operator can see the size of the items to be picked.  Another method is to pick to a plastic bag which can then be put into a suitable sized carton at the end of the pick.  Pick to bag is also useful if your items are really small and you want to pick a lot of small orders in one pass and put them into cartons later.  There is also no reason why you can’t pick directly to Post-packs or other freight bags.

The key is to be able to identify what order is in what plastic bag or carton so that at the end of the pick the order can be confirmed and shipped correctly.  This can be done by attaching the pick slip or a label with the order number to the carton or bag.  With a sophisticated WMS you would be able to know the correct carton size and print a shipping label for each carton so that at the end of the pick the order would be complete and ready for shipping, saving you even more time.

The assumption of this process is of course that the order has been picked accurately and no further checking is necessary.  If you have been picking on paper and packing separately for years then you will know that you have a certain percentage of picking errors.  However I will wager that your packers do not find all the errors and that you still have service failures as a result.  On a pragmatic level you can look at the relative costs of the excess labour in packing vs. the costs of service failures and make a decision, but a cheap process that damages your business through poor service is not really the answer either.  A better way is to make use of available technology to improve your productivity and build quality into your picking process.

A WMS with wireless terminals making use of barcode scanning or voice directed picking will usually have a payback of around six months depending on the size of your business.  This technology will allow you to provide improved service to your customers and reduce your costs at the same time.  I do want to stress however that in accordance with the principles of process design you design the process you need for your business first and pick the technology second.  So although a WMS is a highly desirable technology it is also possible to achieve the same result with a paper based system.

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