Picking Business Process – I | Standard Retail Outbound Needs | Approach to D365 for Commerce with Adv WH Mgmt

Hi Guys, Hope you have read my previous post where we talked about Replenishment business process to fulfil the order and the types of Replenishment process. In this blog, we are going to discuss about the most important process in the Outbound side of the Retail Warehouse that is Picking. Picking is important because that’s where most of the people are inside of a Retail Warehouse. Picking needs to be efficient. So there are several requirements around picking aimed at making pickers more efficient.

If you look at the blueprint, there’s a lot of different ways to pick. And we’re going to look at how in this piece-picking area you can pick in different ways. There’s so many ways and D365 FO supports most important ones, and those are the ones that we’re going to discuss in some detail. So let’s go onto the floor and look at some picking.

When it comes to picking, we really need to discuss about two issues. One is the pick method and the other one is the pick medium.

Picking Method

To the right is the pick cart. Pick cart generally has 12 totes on it or lets assume it has 12 totes. Each tote corresponds to one order that’s been ordered by a consumer. The pickers are going to take these 12 totes on this cart and they’re going to drag it throughout the pick area, making every single pick that’s needed by each of the orders that are on this cart. That means one person picked everything for all 12 orders. That type of picking is called cluster picking, or some people call it multi-order picking. But that’s only one type of picking method.

Different types of Picking Methods

Let us look at different types of Picking methods:

• Single Order Picking
• Multi-Order (Cluster) Picking
• Serial Zone Picking

What is Single Order Picking

Let’s go ahead and get started about some of these different pick methods, beginning with the simplest of all, and that’s single-order picking. And it’s pretty easy to imagine what this is about. But essentially if you got that piece-picking area and you take a single order and hand it to somebody and you tell the person, go out and pick everything that’s needed by this order, and they run out and they pick all those things, then that’s single-order picking which is basically one person picking one order at a time.

What is Multi-Order (Cluster) Picking?

Now we’ll add a little bit of complexity on top of that. We’ll talk about multi-order picking. And multi-order picking looks a lot like single-order picking. You have a cart, you run out and you’re picking things. But instead of picking for one order at a time, you’re actually picking for multiple orders at a time. And your cart has slots on it and each slot is dedicated to a particular order. And as you go along, you’ll be instructed either by the paper or the mobile terminal, to pick a particular item and put it into one of these slots accordingly. The advantage of multi-order picking is you can see on the pick path represented by dotted line, that they’ve traveled essentially the same distance as they did with single-order picking, but they got 12 orders or six orders instead of picking just one. So in this case you have saved considerable amount of walking as a result of picking multiple orders at one time instead of picking them individually.

Variations on Multi-Order (Cluster) Picking

There are a couple of different variations on multi-order picking, or what we call cluster picking in D365 FO, that you need to keep your eyes open for. The first one is that it is common for retailers to have two kinds of carts o pick single-line orders using a singles cart and a multi-line order with a multi-line order cart.

The difference being, the ability to pick 12 orders at a time, whereas for singles they’re putting it up to 60 or 70 on that type of cart because a single is defined as a single unit order. What this does, is, it just reduces the walking that you have to perform in order to get the work done. And many retailers will want to split those two types of orders off and pick singles with a different cart from the multis. And that is why they sometimes want to wave them in such a way that they end up being picked differently. And that’s why they’re very sensitive to the mix of singles versus multi-line orders because of this picking-speed differential between the two types of carts. So you just need to make sure that you understand how many different types of carts they have, because they may have at least multis and singles, but there may also be like multis big or multis small that they have as well. So those are a couple of common variations that you need to consider when talking to a Retail Warehouse Managers about their picking requirements.

Another variation on multi-order or cluster picking is picking straight into the shipping carton. Notice that there’s no totes on this woman’s cart. She’s picking into the individual boxes that are on that cart.

You know, the advantage of doing this is that you eliminate most of the labor that goes on inside of packing because the whole checking and the placing into a box and building a box, all that labor essentially goes away and we save on the number of touches by picking straight into the shipping carton. This is a little less common because a lot of e-commerce retailers still want the confidence that they scanned each and every unit just before it left to go out the door. And so they want to preserve that packing process to ensure the accuracy of the orders. But there’s still a reasonable number of companies out there that have just gone away with or have eliminated most of the packing process and gone to picking straight into the shipping carton just because you save money doing it.

Now let us look how this whole process of cluster picking works. We’re going to follow this young woman as she makes a couple of picks in a cluster pick tour.

What is Serial Zone Picking?

The next picking method that we need to talk about is serial zone picking.

And it comes into play in situations like that shown in this picture where you get so many SKUs that you just can’t put them all on one floor. And so as a result you can’t really haul a cart around and pick every single unit needed by an order because you can’t take a cart unless you had an elevator you can’t really get to all of the items that are needed by a given order. And so as a result of that, you have to put in place some conveyors. They’re not real fancy, but very simple conveyors that allow the totes to pass from zone to zone, as we’ll see here next.

So what usually happens with serial zone picking is you’ll divide all of the SKUs into zones. And usually a zone will represent, say, half a floor or maybe a quarter of a floor. And you’ll have a single individual that works inside of each zone. So each zone gets its own picker. And then what you’ll do is you will induct the totes one at a time into the system, and they’ll flow from zone to zone, like a bucket brigade.

And so, let’s say, for example, this blue tote will go into zone 1, and the picker in zone 1 will pick all the items needed by that blue tote that are in zone 1. They’ll put them into the tote and then they’ll push it on and then that tote will travel to the next zone. There the picker in zone 2 will pick anything that’s needed by that blue tote that’s stored in zone 2 and then they’ll pass it on to zone 3, it will go to zone 4, zone 5, zone 6, etc., until all of the units have been picked for that blue tote. And then it will ride down to packing where it will get packed out. But the same method could be used with a shipping carton and you could eliminate much of the labor associated with the packing process by doing that. But, again, serial zone picking is really done when you have so many SKUs that you can’t put them all on one floor and so carts really don’t make any sense and you have to convey individual totes from zone to zone to get all the items that might be ordered by a particular consumer or store into that tote. So let’s see how serial zone picking works.

What is Pick & Pass Picking?

This picking occurs when you have a small number of SKUs and they all can fit onto one aisle, but they are also very popular. This form of picking is called pick-and-pass picking. And it’s very similar to the bucket brigade concept than even serial zone picking is, except you don’t pass buckets, you pass store cartons down the line. Let’s watch a video to see just how this works. Here is a short film demonstrating pick-and-pass piece picking.

When do you use which Pick Method?

So far we have talked about how serial zone picking is common when the number of SKUs won’t fit all onto one floor. And this happens a lot in the e-commerce channel. If you can’t get all the SKUs onto one floor, then usually multi-order picking with carts or cluster picking is preferred. And this works well in both e-commerce as well as brick-and-mortar channels. And if you have few hundred SKU that fit in one aisle, then Pick & Pass Picking might come in handy and this is common in brick-and-mortar retailers, less so in e-commerce companies.

So I hope you got little understanding on Picking process and especially about different Picking methods that are involved in this process, that’s what you should expect a Retail Warehouse manager to be asking about.

In the next blog, we’re going to discuss more on the Picking process and talk about the different Pick mediums involved in Picking.

Feel free to reach out for any clarifications. If you like my blog posts then comment and subscribe to the blogs.

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