BROKEN CASE PICKING SYSTEMS

Chapter seven RightStore Pieces: Piece Picking Principles, Systems, and Best Practices

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Carton Flow Rack Gravity-flow racks (Figures 7.15 through 7.18) are typically used for SKUs with a high broken-case cube movement stored in fairly uniformly sized and shaped cartons. Cartons are placed at the back of the rack from the replenishment aisle and advance/roll toward the pick face as cartons are depleted from the front. The back-to-front movement ensures first in, first out (FIFO) turnover of the material. In essence, a section of flow rack is a bin shelving unit turned perpen dicular to the picking aisle with rollers placed on the shelves. The deeper the sections, the greater is the portion of warehouse space that will be devoted to storage as opposed to aisle space. Further gains in space and labor efficiency can be achieved by making use of the cubic space over the flow rack for full-pallet storage of reserve quantities of the items located below. As is the case with bin shelving, flow racks have very low maintenance requirements and are available in a wide variety of standard section and lane sizes from a number of suppliers. The fact that just one carton of each line item is located on the pick face means that a large number of SKUs are presented to pickers along the pick line. Hence, walking and therefore labor requirements can be reduced with

Figure 7.15 Gravity-flow-rack picking operation

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