ORDER PICKING OPTIMIZATION

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World-Class Warehousing and Material Handling

as the other bins. It was so unusual compared with other bins in her zone that I asked her about the arrangement of that particular bin. She told me that the bin contained merchandise that customers were going to order that day. How did she know this? She did not have ESP or claim to function as the world’s greatest forecasting system. The items in that bin were A-movers that had not been properly reslotted. The order picker grew tired of travel ing to the end of her zone for those popular items. She simply moved some of the inventory for those items close to the front of the zone. This simple process improvement would have been impossible without the product and location familiarity that comes with zone picking. True Value Hardware At True Value Hardware, each of its small-item order picking areas is configured in single-aisle zones. A take-away belt conveyor runs down the center of each zone, allowing an operator to make one pass through the zone during a pick wave. During a pass, each operator works with a roll of picking labels. The labels present items in location sequence to the order picker, who picks an item, places a bar-code label on the item, places the labeled item on the belt conveyor, and moves to the next location. The take-away belt conveyor feeds a downstream sorting system that sorts the items coming from each zone into retail-store orders. At the end of each zone, the performance statistics, including picking productivity, picking accuracy (via internal audit), and housekeeping for the zone, are posted. Talk about public accountability! The benefits of zone picking—reduced travel time, minimal congestion, product-location familiarity, and operator-zone accountability—may or may not pay for the associated costs and inherent control complexities presented by zone picking. Table 8.3 describes some of those costs and control difficulties. Free-Form Picking As described earlier, in free-form picking, order pickers are free to operate outside the confines of picking zones. In free-form picking, the toughest

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