Case Picking Industry Information
Case Picking
Case picking is the gathering of full cartons or boxes of product,
typically done on a pallet. Extremely important among warehouses
processes, there are a wide variety of methods for case picking that
range in terms of difficulty level. For instance, the most basic method
of case picking involves a person who serves as the order picker of a
stationary product that is stored on either static shelving or a pallet
rack. However, other methods of order picking involve machinery such as
automatic palletizers and forklift trucks.
The three most important aspects of
successful case picking are high productivity, short cycle times, or the
amount of time is takes to get an order from order entry to the
shipping dock, and a high level of accuracy. Unfortunately, in some case
picking methods, achieving one objective can interfere with achieving
the others. Therefore, it is important not to put too much emphasis on
one objective versus the other two, but instead to implement a case
picking method that offers a balance of the three. Used primarily to get
orders ready to be transported, order picking is essential to
industries such as office furniture, food processing, industrial,
pharmaceutical, warehousing, commercial, distribution and material
handling.
There are four common case picking methods: the basic case
picking method, batch picking, zone picking and wave picking. In the
basic case picking method, the products are stored on either a pallet
rack or various floor locations in bulk. A hand pallet jack or a
motorized pallet truck will then pick the cases up from the storage area
and transport the product to its desired location in order to be
packed. In batch picking multiple cases will be picked in a single run
in order to fulfill multiple orders. Typically, a picker will use a cart
with multiple cartons so that they are able to fulfill more picks per
trip to one bin or many bins in the same location. However, batch
picking is rarely used in case picking because there is only so much
space on a pallet to be filled. In zone picking, the warehouse is
divided into several pick zones that are each assigned to an order
picker. That order picker can only pick the items in that zone. The
orders are picked at the same time that they are moving on conveyor
systems from one zone to the next. This case picking method is also not
often used. Wave picking is a variation of zone picking. In wave picking
the orders move from one zone to the next for picking while all zones
are picked at the same time. The products are later sorted and
consolidated into individual orders. Wave picking is the quickest case
picking method for picking multiple orders.