Ways to Pick and Ship Orders Faster

Order picking is a necessity in any large warehouse, and improving its process is essential for customer satisfaction. The order-picking process serves as the last touchpoint between you and your customers before your product travels to its destination.

To remain competitive in your market, you must constantly strive to ship your customers’ orders faster while ensuring picking accuracy is still maintained. Before we look at how to pick and ship orders quickly, here are some important details about the order picking process.

What Is Order Picking?

Simply put, order picking is selecting items from inventory to fill an order for a customer. Many warehouses still operate with a manual process, but a few also use robots to assist. Employees are then assigned to monitor the activities of these intelligent machines.

Another order picking method many warehouses use is a conveyor belt. That way, employees don’t have to walk around the entire warehouse to fill orders. Instead, an employee can select the items and put them on a conveyor belt, reducing movement and time spent filling the order.

The most common technology to improve with order picking efficiency and accuracy is leveraging mobile barcode scanners to assist warehouse operators quickly find the product and ensure the right products are scanned to fulfill the order.

How to Improve the Efficiency of Pick and Ship Orders

Making your order picking process more efficient will help you keep your consumers satisfied and excited enough to keep purchasing from you. It also enhances your productivity and allows you to make more sales per day.

The following order picking and eCommerce management tips can help transform your business and improve your bottom line:

• Categorize your items: After using the 80/20 rule or Pareto analysis, you’ll discover that just 20 percent of the products you stock will fulfill 80 percent of customer orders. Grouping this 20 percent into a section of your warehouse will make it easier for order pickers to find the products they need. The area where these items are stored must, however, be designed to enhance the movement of pickers.
• Let pickers touch items just once: To reduce errors, you need to create a workflow that eliminates the need for repacking before shipping. Immediately after the items are picked and verified that they match the order, they should be placed in shipping cartons and moved to the loading area.
• Automate processes: Unfortunately, with manual procedures, your order pickers will spend more than half of their time walking to pick products or moving products up and down. With careful planning, though, you can leverage mobile barcode scanners and fulfill orders by batches by combining multiple orders in a batch to reduce the required number of picking trips.
• Leverage technology: As your business scales, leveraging technology such as mobile barcode scanners will allow your warehouse operators to work in a more efficient manner.

See If Finale Inventory Can Improve Your Order Picking Process

To improve your order picking process, you need to use the best inventory management software. Finale Inventory is the top-rated inventory management system with a robust warehouse management feature and integrated barcode scanning solution.

Use this software to improve order fulfillment on your eCommerce site by starting your free 14-day trial today. Or give us a call at 888-792-8891 to find out more about how to improve your order picking and shipping process now.