ORDER PICKING OPTIMIZATION

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World-Class Warehousing and Material Handling

justify the incremental investment. The incremental benefits are primarily picking productivity benefits. The incremental cost is the difference between the cost of the material- and information-handling systems required for downstream sorting versus that required for passing the order contents from zone to zone. Manual Downstream Sorting: Lanier Worldwide Lanier Worldwide is a multibillion dollar distributor of copiers, fax machines, and dictation equipment. Amajor portion of its revenue comes from service parts and supplies that support its installation base. For parts and supplies picking, Lanier has devised a manual downstream sorting zone picking concept. Parts and supplies are stored in traditional bin shelving. Operators are assigned to zones comprised of two aisles of shelving (Figure 8.8). Orders are released to the picking floor in 20-minute waves, just long enough to allow efficient picking tours and just short enough to maintain the attention and sense of urgency of the order pickers. Each order picker pushes a specially designed picking cart through his or her zone. Each picking cart is subdivided into eight compartments. Before each picking tour, an empty tote labeled with that zone and operator’s identification is placed in each of the eight containers. At the beginning of each wave, an order picker is given a pick list that walks the operator through his or her zone in location sequence. On each line on the pick list is the location, the item ID, the quantity to pick, and the number of the compartment (one to eight) on the cart into which to place the item. At the end of a tour, each order picker brings his or her cart to a large storage rack that is subdivided into (you guessed it) eight compartments. Each operator puts his or her number one tote in the number one compartment, his or her number two tote in the number two compartment, and so on. Standing on the other side of the storage compartment is an operator whose job is to sort the merchandise in each compartment into orders, check the order for accuracy, and pack the contents of the order for shipping. This operation yields manual picking productivity in excess of 120 lines per person-hour and exceptionally high picking accuracy.

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