SpanTrack & Wave Order Picking

Since we launched this blog, we’ve talked many times about the importance of efficiency as it relates to saving your company money. It’s easy for companies to overlook an inefficient layout or order picking method in the course of their day-to-day business. It’s easy to see how accidents or damaged products impact your bottom line, but it’s more difficult to see how inefficient picking does if you don’t know where to look. That is where UNEX comes in.

Our Pickologists are trained to spot inefficiencies in order picking and layout and can help ensure your manual pickers are working as safely and efficiently as possible.

When it comes to manual picking, it is very important to understand your throughput statistics. What are your slow, medium, and fast moving products, and how are they being stored? What is an average order size? It doesn’t make sense to use shelf storage for your fastest moving products or keep your very slow movers palletized. If you need help determining these statistics, UNEX can help!

For medium moving products that don’t move in huge volumes per order, SpanTrack combined with wave or batch order picking can be a monumental money saver for your organization. Wave or batch picking is a picking strategy where a manual picker picks multiple orders at once rather than fulfilling each order with individual picks. So a picker may pick ten orders in one “wave” instead of making ten individual trips to the pick line. Over the course of a single shift this could save hundreds of unnecessary trips to and from the pick line.

Wave order picking is even further enhanced when combined with SpanTrack. Using SpanTrack allows companies to consolidate their pick slots, thereby allowing more pick slots per linear pick foot. So instead of having two skids in an eight ft. space with two SKUs, you can now have 28 facings of SpanTrack in that same area. That 14/1 SKU ratio combined with the 10/1 (in this example) pick ratio when implementing a wave is a sure formula to increase your efficiency and save you money!

Think your warehouse could benefit from enhanced wave picking with Span Track? Contact a UNEX Pickologist today to learn more!