Efficient Picking in Retail Warehousing | Approach to D365 for Commerce with Adv WH Mgmt

Hi guys, In this blog, we are going to understand another key aspect of Retail Warehousing which is Picking and Movement inside Retail Warehouse. Any Retail warehouse depends on effortless operations to carry out its daily Warehouse activity. This may be very true for a hypermarket where you have to replenish goods over shelves daily to cope up with a day to day demand or for an eCommerce Warehouse. The movement of pickers and picking of goods to fulfill the orders depends on how well the Storage of a Retail Warehouse is planned which is exactly what we talked about in my earlier post.

In fact, the movement and picking process can be the difference between success and failure, depending on how efficient it is. Here we need to make sure people walk or travel as efficiently as possible. Basically what goes inside a Retail warehouse is that everyone is running all over the place.  People are walking to pick locations to pick the product. People are walking to put the product up for replenishment.  People are walking to bring products together at the packing station.  There is just walking, walking, walking, and more walking.  All this walking adds up to create overall slowness in the shipment lead time.

Travel time can easily account for 55% or more of order picking hours. It’s no warehouse industry secret that order picking is also the most labor-intensive part of every warehouse operation. By combining orders into a single travel instance the time spent traveling is greatly reduced. The smaller the order, the better the opportunity to combine multiple orders into a single travel instance. If you want to understand why warehouse managers in the retail warehouse are so maniacal about reducing travel times, all you have to do is look at how those pickers spend their day.  If you split the hours of the picking process at a particular retail warehouse, and you can see that 50% of their day is spent just on walking and 50% on actually picking the item.  The percentage may vary depending upon, how efficient the Retail warehouse is planned.  And hence, there’s a lot of money that is expended on walking. So a lot of the questions and a lot of the requirements that go into a retail warehouse setup revolve around how can you reduce the amount of walking that the associates have to do.

As a result of this interest in minimizing travel, you’re going to encounter, either in the presales phase or in the elicitation phase, questions that focus on movement.  You may encounter a few questions like :

• Do you support nested license plates so that I can move a bunch of cases to the same general location in one go, as opposed to having to move each of them individually?
• Can we execute replenishment as well as putaway in groups so that if we have lots of small boxes that need to be put up, say, in the same general area, the system can guide the putaway or the replenishment operator through some kind of an efficient tour?
• How you batch orders into efficient pick tours. Because the amount of labor in picking is significant.  This is highly correlated with how the orders are clustered together to form a picking tour.
• How does the system figure out, if you’ve got 20 picks, how does it figure out which one to give to the picker next? Imagine, if the mailman drives up your street, you know, he can go down, say, all the mailboxes on the left side of the road and come back up the right side, or he can go from left to right, left to right, left.  It depends on, the methodology and the same thing applies to the pickers. How does the system serve those picks to the pickers? What about interleaving? How can I interleave the replenishment task with the putaway task, again to reduce travel?

Now let’s look at the number of steps you can take in your retail warehouse to make your movement and picking process more effective. Here are few that we will talk about:

Mixing multiple SKU’s

If multiple SKU’s are mixed in the same bin location, then it impacts the overall picking productivity of the picker. This can take a considerable amount of time for any picker due to this mixing of multiple SKUs. We see this in many warehouses where a bin location may represent a shelf level that contains 5 – 10 SKU’s. The picker is directed to the shelf level and then needs to search through the different SKUs to find the item to be picked.

If large bins are used for smaller items, they may end up mixing of items as well to fill the entire bin. Again this may lead to impacting the picking and thereby overall shipping process and eventually lowering the picker’s efficiency. If you have small items, make sure each individual SKU number has its own bin. If space is a concern, consider switching to smaller bins for the small individual pieces. You’ll have fewer errors and a more productive picking crew.

Microsoft D365 F&O support managing of a fixed location for a product or product variant in a given warehouse. Also, a Location stocking limit can be set up to have enough inventory at the picking location thereby reducing the error of mixing the items.

So having a discrete pick location for every SKU is rule #1 of every Retail warehouse.

Consider different order picking methods

Reducing travel time or Movement improves order picking productivity. This is why batch and cluster order picking strategies are used in different warehouses. That is why some companies invest in conveyor systems. So choosing the correct picking method also improves the picker movement.

• Zone picking: Each order picker is assigned a specific zone and will only realize order picking within this zone.
• Cluster picking: An order picker is assigned and picks multiple orders simultaneously, minimizing trips to each location.
• Wave picking: A variation of zone and batch picking. Rather than orders moving from one zone to the next for picking, all zones are picked at the same time and the items are later sorted and consolidated into individual orders/shipments.

Organizing your inventory

The most inefficient movement will be to walk from one end of the warehouse to others to simply fulfill a single order. This might be due to organizing the inventory by SKU or category level but this sometimes ends up costing too much time for the picker. It might seem like a good idea to organize everything by SKU number, simply because it makes it easier to restock, but if you have many parts that tend to get ordered together, it might be a good idea to organize your inventory by sales rather than by SKU.

Efficient Storage

We have seen in my earlier blog how efficient storage is a key aspect of retail warehousing.

System verification

Design your standard operating procedures to double-verify almost every step in the picking process. You can loosen this later as needed. For example, utilize area’s pick verification flags to have user scan and verify LPN, quantity, item, etc. Count Back or Count Near Zero can also be used to count remaining inventory in a location in-line with picking.

Microsoft D365 F&O Warehouse management module provides different verification mechanisms for the picking process thereby making the entire picking process reliable. You might want a picker to scan the location again to make sure he is picking from the right position even though the mobile device is already directing him/her to the right location. It also offers different verification mechanisms for quantity, zones, bins, positions, etc.

For example, this is the standard cluster picking screen in D365 F&O Warehouse mobile app. In most industries like manufacturing or wholesale, when you’re not visiting this screen very often it doesn’t really matter what it looks. But in a moderately sized Retail warehouse, this particular screen will be visited thousands of times per day. And so it should be easy to use and quick, there should not have lots of excess scanning, and it should also be intuitive because the people that are using it most likely won’t have college degrees. They probably haven’t had much more than a few days of on-the-job training so it can’t be complicated and confusing. And if it looks confusing to the warehouse manager, he’s going to have questions and they would like things to be changed on this screen.

When you see this screen the quantity of the pick is 7.00 and some industries would require you to pick the catchweight items, items such as meat that might be measured in less than integer quantities like you need to pick 7.5 pounds. But in most retail warehouses, you’re picking an integer number of units.  You don’t pick 7.5 glasses or 8.2 chainsaws. And all this is going to cause some picker to mess up. Instead of picking seven there will be one or two during that thousands of transactions per day that will misread this and pick 700 or 100 or something of a given item and throw it into a box, and they’ll be kind of confused, why doesn’t this fit better? So you need to be aware and be sensitive to how the screens are used in retail compared to other industries.

But the good news is D365 F&O Warehouse mobile app has really got a neat user interface that we can tailor with some amount of work. It doesn’t require really deep modifications to fix things like this 7.00 issue. And you should be confident in talking to a warehouse manager about this capability because it will make a difference to them. So when you start talking to the warehouse manager about how D365 F&O Warehouse Management could fill those needs, don’t be surprised if they ask questions because of the way Warehouse mobile device is designed that-

• It seems like we have to scan so much more than we should. For example – Why do we have to scan the location and the product?
• Why do I need a mobile device, to begin with?
• Why can’t I use paper pick lists to pick with? Because I have to buy a mobile device for every person, and if I’m only going to have these people in the warehouse, a large majority of them are only going to work for four or five weeks and I will have to spend an incredible extra amount of money that’s going to sit just wasted most of the year because those terminals aren’t needed.
• Can we fine-tune Mobile device screens? Can I change the font size or make font red instead of a standard blue? Can I take this field off the screen, because it’s confusing and we don’t really use it?
• Can I tailor the screen so that for picking, the experienced people can use one screen where they have to do maybe less verification that they’re doing their job right, versus another screen that we give to the less experienced or new temporary associates that really forces them to validate that they have picked the right item or put the product in the right location?

Because of these reasons selecting the right Warehouse management system becomes extremely important so that you can efficiently select the best picking method for your Retail warehouse. Under-performance in your picking method results in diminished customer service, high overhead costs, and a weakening in your supply chain. Naturally, improving your order picking methodology will boost your bottom line. And here is where D365 F&O fills the Gap of being the right WMS solution for the Retailers. D365 for Commerce and Advance Warehouse management goes hand in hand to provide the best solution for Retail warehousing.

I hope this blog helps you in some or the other way in this Retail Journey.

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Disclaimer: The information in the weblog is provided “AS IS”; with no warranties, and confers no rights. All blog entries and editorial comments are the opinions of the author.

Credits: Microsoft Learn, Microsoft Docs