How to Improve Warehouse Picking Speed and Accuracy

The warehouse is one of the most crucial parts of a business’s logistics. If promises to customers are broken, it usually happens because of a mistake being made here. With expectations for next-day delivery, warehouse managers are under extreme pressure to fulfil orders faster than ever. 

However, speed means absolutely nothing if the wrong item lands on a customer’s doorstep. Read on to find out how your warehouse can improve efficiency to ensure it is working both quickly and accurately when picking orders. 

6 Steps to Improve Warehouse Efficiency

1. Improve Picking Accuracy

Mispicks are one of the most undervalued mistakes that can hurt profits. Between the cost of having the item returned, restocking, and the impact on customer trust, a single picking error can entirely wipe out profit margins for a single order. Ensuring orders are correctly picked should be a top priority for every business. 

Utilising picking trolleys can make a huge difference when picking orders accurately. They make it easier to collect multiple items at once, and pushing something is far safer than carrying something, reducing the risk of injury or dropping an item. For businesses with a large number of orders, employees will likely be picking multiple orders at once as well. Implementing clear visual boundaries at the point of pick can help organise things and reduce the chance of any mistakes. Utilising a 3-tier trolley along with dividers and totes or compartments with each order number on them can help reduce the risk of mixing up items. 

2. Increase Order Pick Rate 

Your order pick rate determines your warehouse’s overall capacity. When the number of items being picked drops, this can cause a backlog to grow and delays to shipments. 

Pickers are human, not machines. If there are things during their shift that slow things down, like collecting heavy items, manoeuvring awkward items, or working with old or poorly maintained equipment, pick rates can drop significantly.

Your team is only as good as the equipment they are using. Ensure they are working with a well-maintained picking trolley that is easy to manoeuvre. Upgrading to an industrial-grade picking trolley notably reduces the physical effort required to move through a warehouse and its aisles. When picking heavy items, you’ll also need a trolley that is able to handle the weight to avoid it tipping or breaking. You should look for a picking trolley that can handle a uniformly distributed load (UDL) up to 450kg, like the one we offer. 

3. Minimising Travel Distance Per Pick

Up to 50% of a picker’s time is spent walking. If your team is wandering from one side of the warehouse to the other for a single order, you are losing time and money.

Batch or cluster picking should be implemented. This strategy allows someone to collect items for multiple orders that share the same zone or aisle in one pick.  

Having a trolley that is large enough for batch picking allows your team to comfortably pick multiple orders in one trip rather than doing about 5 separate trips to the exact same area of the warehouse. 

4. Accurate Inventory 

If your inventory system says an item is in a certain location, but pickers can’t find it, this can considerably slow things down. Shelving should be organised carefully to ensure things are easy to see and that nothing is being hidden behind other products. 

Accurate inventory software should be used to ensure you can easily keep track of stock, and that it has things marked in the correct locations. 

5. Optimising Warehouse Space Utilisation 

Strategically planning out your warehouse can make a notable difference when improving picking speeds. 

Having a warehouse that is easy to move around is essential for efficient picking. If aisles are too narrow or have large items sticking off of shelves, it can slow things down and increase the risk of accidents.

Items that regularly sell should be kept at eye level so they’re easy to see and reach. Slower-moving products should be safely stored on the higher shelves. They’ll likely require a ladder to reach and take longer to pick.  

6. Streamlining Packing and Shipping Workflow

Optimising your warehouse doesn’t stop once an item is pulled from the shelf. Bottlenecks can regularly occur at packing stations. Cluttered and disorganised packing areas can result in missing shipping labels, mismatched boxes, and a slow packaging process.    

The solution is to implement purpose-built Packing Workbenches. They are designed to include storage space for packing materials to keep everything neatly organised. Having space for label printers and boxes helps keep everything within arm’s reach, reducing time spent moving around looking for things.  

Once the item has been packaged, it’s time for the final leg of the fulfilment journey. Ensuring packages are carefully organised so they can be moved to dispatch locations is key. A Deep Basket Trolley is one of the best ways to improve this final step. A deep mesh basket safely holds freshly packaged parcels that are ready for dispatch. Packages can be stacked in the basket trolley without any falling out of the sides and ending up misplaced. This helps keep the rest of your packing space tidy and ensures all parcels are in a safe place before being put in a delivery van. 

We recommend incorporating multiple deep basket trolleys based on things like the selected shipping option or grouping by customer for bulk orders. The castors allow them to be easily moved to the delivery van, making the final step from the warehouse as smooth as possible.  

How Can Benchmster Help?

Without an organised warehouse and smooth picking process, businesses are severely limiting their ability to accurately fulfil customer orders. By following the steps above and incorporating functional equipment that is well maintained, businesses can help pickers perform to their best to ensure operations are running efficiently.      

We provide high-quality UK-made commercial trolleys, along with packing benches. 

Get in touch if you have any questions about choosing the right picking and packing solutions for your warehouse.

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