Most ecommerce businesses pick and ship their orders using the same general workflow. A warehouse manager may start by printing out paper pick lists for each order waiting to be shipped. This paper slips are then taken into the warehouse for order picking. Once each item in an order has been picked, it’s handed off to the shipping department. The shipping crew then packs and weighs the order, then prints a shipping label.
The warehouse management industry refers to this workflow as discrete order fulfillment. It’s a simple and easy to adopt way to fulfill orders of any amount. This makes it a clear choice for ecommerce businesses that are just starting out and growing. But businesses that are facing an increasing order demand need a way to speed up their order fulfillment. If this sounds like your business, batch picking and shipping may be the answer.
Problems with discrete fulfillment
There’s no mystery to why almost every ecommerce business starts off with discrete fulfillment. There are no up-front costs outside of the bare necessities: all you need is a printer hooked up to a computer. From there, it’s a simple task to pick up a packing slip, read the items listed, and find them in your warehouse.
As simple as discrete picking is to adopt, it’s just as simple to find flaws in its efficiency. First, there is little to no verification of accurate picking. You have no way to know right away that the item you grabbed from the shelf is the correct item for the order. Sure, you can check and double-check from the packing slip, but that’s not 100% reliable.
There’s also no streamlining of your movement through the warehouse while picking discrete orders. A multi-item order may cause you to zig zag from one picking location to another as you move down the list. This may not seem like a big deal at first glance, but that extra walking around will add up to a lot of wasted time. Time is money, especially when it comes to order fulfillment.
The worst offense by discrete fulfillment workflows is at the beginning. Printing out paper pick lists ahead of time and sorting them by hand is a criminal time sink. It’s a chore that robs your business of productive time every day. The sooner you throw out the paper slips and switch to an automated electronic order picking solution, the better.
Barcode-based order picking
The first step to a more efficient order picking workflow, for most warehouses, is to implement barcoding. This simple switch will ensure that all your orders are picked with 100% accuracy. Order picking software can deliver instant feedback when an item is scanned. Your pickers know right away if they pulled the right items or not.
As we’ve already discussed, paper packing slips are your worst nightmare in order picking. The lists take too long to print out and organize in the morning. They also present way too high of a margin for error when verifying order items. Replace those slips with an electronic order picking solution powered by barcode verification.
Barcode scanning makes it easier to train new warehouse employees to start order picking. New pickers don’t need to learn through trial and error what each item’s SKU refers to. They can simply pick the line items and scan their barcodes to confirm they picked the right stuff.
Barcode-based order picking
The first step to a more efficient order picking workflow, for most warehouses, is to implement barcoding. This simple switch will ensure that you pick all your orders with 100% accuracy. Order picking software can deliver instant feedback when you scan items. Your pickers know right away if they pulled the right items or not.
As we’ve already discussed, paper packing slips are your worst nightmare in order picking. The lists take too long to print out and organize in the morning. They also present way too high of a margin for error when verifying order items. Replace those slips with an electronic order picking solution powered by barcode verification.
Barcode scanning makes it easier to train new warehouse employees to start order picking. New pickers don’t need to learn through trial and error what each item’s SKU refers to. They can just pick the line items and scan their barcodes to confirm they picked the right stuff.
Switching to batch picking
Ready to take your order fulfillment to the next level? Batch picking may be your business’s next big step. Batch picking is a process in which a picker fulfills several orders at once. This is done by grouping similar orders together into batches and handing each batch off to a picker.
As you pick items for a batch, you won’t need to walk to the same picking location more than once. Since the batch will often include multiple orders requesting a certain item, you can just pick the total quantity of that item needed. This is especially helpful for the many single-item orders that involve your top-selling products.
You can make batch picking even more efficient by using organized warehouse locations. With a location-based batch picking system, your pickers will be directed from one location to another. This ensures that they move through the warehouse in one smooth loop, rather than zig-zagging from shelf to shelf.
Once you’ve finished picking items for an order, you can ship all those orders at once. With barcode-based picking, there’s no need to double-check orders before packing and shipping them. That means that a batch is ready to be shipped as soon as it has cleared the picking process.
SKULabs offers an all-in-one batch picking and shipping solution. You can set up a unified catalog with barcodes for all your sales channels. Then, you can import orders from every channel and automatically sort them into batches. Try it out today and see how much time you can take back from your order fulfillment workflow.
