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

Hi Guys, Welcome to the second part of the Picking business process in the outbound side of the Retail Warehouse. In the previous post we talked about different Picking methods and which method to select depending the Retailer. In this blog, we will look at different pick medium involved in picking process.

Pick Medium

The second thing that we need to discuss about is pick medium. Such as a paper picklist. This lists all the picks that the picker needs to make for this particular cart. There’s other kinds of pick mediums, such as mobile device terminals, labels, pick to light.

What Picking Mediums Might be Considered?

A picking medium is the way in which a picker finds out where they need to go to make a pick, what they need to pick once they get there, how many they need to pick, and it also ensures that they went to the right location and that they picked the right item and the right quantity. So it’s not only direction that you get from the picking medium, it’s also confirmation that you get from the picking medium. There’s a bunch of different ways to get this information and to do these confirmations.

Paper

The most common across most warehouses is paper. And most warehouses probably use that method so that a picker has a picklist. And they just go out, and as they complete each pick, they’re checking them off. And it has the location that they need to go to and the quantity listed on the paper picklist. But that’s not necessarily the best way. It may be the least capital intense, but it’s prone to some errors and some other things. So over the years, other picking methods have come to be.

Mobile Device

The one that’s the probably most popular is what we would call RF picking or mobile device or mobile terminals. These are little hand-held computers that have barcode scanners built into them. And so they provide real-time information to the picker on where to go, and they confirm what he or she did to make sure that they’re picking the correct product.

Voice

A more recent entry is voice picking. You can use a portable computer terminal that you hang from your belt and you can talk to it, and it’ll direct you to where you need to go and it’ll confirm that you pick stuff correctly.

Labels

Less common but interesting and different is use of labels, as you see over here in this picture. The labels tell you where to go. And you get one label per pick. So the quantity is usually very easy because if you are told to pick two of something, you’re going to have two labels.

Batch Terminals

Less common is batch terminals. You don’t see these as much as it used to. But instead of being live like the mobile device terminals that are connected straight into, say, D365 FO, these download the picks that you need to make, and then you go out. They’re not connected to the network. They actually just walk you through the process of performing the picks and confirming that you picked. And then when you get done, you upload the results back to the warehouse management.

Pick to Light

There is other techniques that is pick to light which is usually a device that you have to interface to the warehouse management system that when an order or a tote enters into a zone, you scan that tote and it will turn on lights underneath all the items that need to be picked to be placed in this tote. And so as the fella picks the item, he will push a button that will turn off that light to confirm that he’s picked that item and placed it into the tote.

Value of Picking Mediums

So now we’re going to talk about the most common Picking mediums that are used by most of the retailers.

Value of RF (Mobile Device) Picking

Let’s talk a little bit more about what we call RF picking, or in the D365 FO it’s called mobile device picking. The advantage of using a mobile device to pick with is seemingly obvious at first. The ability to scan the barcode on the location as well as scan the product really seems to ensure that you’re going to pick what you’re supposed to pick. And this is great as long as most of the order lines you have are single-unit order lines. You’re never going to know if you didn’t pick two when you were supposed to pick two and you only picked one. But at least you’ll know you picked one correctly. But probably the most interesting benefit of using a mobile device terminal to pick with is that the inventory is real time. What we mean by this is that the system knows where everything is in the warehouse.

And if you run across the situation like you see the young lady on the right encountering where you’ve been directed to a location and the product is not there, what do you do next? In environments that use paper or labels or something else, this is a real hassle because you’ve got to go find somebody to help you deal with this, or you’re just going to put the whole order off to the side and let somebody else deal with it. And it can be very expensive to fix these kinds of mistakes in environments that aren’t real-time. And if you’re picking with RF or a mobile device terminal, the situation is a lot easier to deal with.

Because you see on this screen a button called short pick and skip, well, when you press short pick, you can request another location that has this exact same product in it. And you can go to that location and pick it. Now, that works great if you happen to have multiple locations in your forward pick area of the same item. It’s less powerful if they have to drive all the way back and climb up into the rack and pick something. But you can also think that same capability could be used to launch, say, emergency replenishments that are used to update this pick phase so in turn you could skip the pick and come back to it later on once that replenishment has been completed. So there’s a number of things you can do with a mobile device terminal that you can’t really do with paper or with labels.

Value of Label Picking

Well, after we have discussed all nice things about RF picking, you’d kind of wonder why you’d want to pick any way else because there’s certain advantages that label picking has over RF or mobile device picking. When you pick with labels, you get one label per unit that you need to pick.

And the label will look something like this. If you look carefully at that label, it shows the pick location that you need to go to, it shows you where you need to put that unit and if you’re thinking about a cart that has multiple slots, and this tells you to put it in slot 22. Now, there’s another really neat advantage to this that is the order number. So what’s the advantage of that over mobile device picking? Well, pickers will pick things, they’ll put them on their cart, they’ll start running along and then they’ll bang into something, maybe another cart or maybe the rack itself, and, units will fall out of that cart and they’ll fall onto the floor. And this does happen more than you would be surprised. Well, the beauty of having labels is labels that have the order with it, you can then look and see what order that is, and then you can go figure out or look up in the system where that particular cart was staged or where it’s being packed, and you can run that unit over to the pack station and they can pack it into the rest of the order. And this eliminates the need to send somebody out to do a short pick because it was discovered short in the packing station.

The real advantage, though, comes from the ability to pick more accurately than you actually can pick with RF devices. Now, RF is really good when you have inexperienced pickers. But if you have experienced pickers, you can get pretty much really good picking accuracy using labels. And sometimes you can get even better picking accuracy because with labels one of the mistakes that you could catch that you can’t catch with RF is that you can catch the situation where the picker is trying to pick too few units for a given order. So if you have a lot of order lines where somebody’s ordering two or three of something, with RF picking, you can make sure that they go to the right location and that they picked at least the right product once, but you can’t be sure that they pick, say, the right quantity because there’s no way to kind of discern how many they really did pick. Whereas with label picking, when they have to stick a label on every single unit they pick, it’s really, really hard to screw up and not pick the right quantity of units, because you’re sitting there with all these extra labels and you know that you got to keep applying them.

The other thing that people will tell you is that they like it because it can be a little bit faster and the pickers themselves can use the labels to sort a pick sequence that is actually a little more efficient than that which they would get from using an RF terminal. But you have to be an experienced picker to be able to do that. So, again, the advantages really hold true when you have experienced pickers and they don’t really stand up when you have lots of inexperienced pickers and a lot of single-unit picks.

Value of Paper Picking

So this is paper picking. Another advantage of paper picking as well as labels, is that with paper picking or with labels, you don’t have to pay for the RF terminal. And as a result, you have a lot of people that really like this in retail because during the fourth quarter where you have to increase your staff or you have to double it or triple it in some places, you don’t have to pay for a bunch of mobile device terminals that sit idle for nine months out of the year. You could just, you know, keep handing out paper picklists and people can roar out there and go pick stuff. You can have paper picklists also that support cluster picking.

So I hope you got a better understanding on Picking process and the requirements associated with it and the different types of Picking method and mediums to select or recommend, that’s what you should expect a Retail Warehouse manager to be asking about.

In the next blog, we’re going to talk about one of the really distinguishing characteristics of a Retail Warehouse, especially if it offers or sells via the e-commerce channel, is personalization.

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