Picking and Putting

Picking and Putting Operators

Flow-Through Store Put
Is a modified cross docking process that allows the user to break out single products (eaches) by retail store or store zone/department. Once broken out, the operator puts the product away into specific store cartons via put-to-light, RF directed putting, carousels, put-to-display, put-to-voice, or small parcel sortation. When the carton is full or delivery time limits have been met, the store specific carton is placed on a takeaway conveyor to be transported to shipping sortation. Likewise, the flow-through store putting method is efficient because it does not require to distribution centers to both put-away and picking of the product.

Fasteners

Picking Methodologies
Picking methodologies fall into two major categories:

  1. Wave Picking – is a picking methodology where a large quantity of product is picked from a single storage location for all of the orders within the wave. The large quantity is placed on a conveyor belt and is sorted downstream into the individual orders. A wave could consist of 75 orders and take approximately 45 minutes to fill. This method is advantageous if there a relatively small number of orders and a high level of commonality among the products being picked.
    2. Phone
  2. Individual Order Picking – is a picking methodology used to route individual orders into and out of picking zones. The picking zones might use different technologies including carousels, pick-to-light, carton flow, shelving, etc. The individual order picking method is advantageous if there is a relatively large number of orders and a low level of commonality on the products being picked. Within a pick zone, several individual orders are often batched into groups of four to ten. The batching of orders allows the operator to go to the picking location once and, then, turn around and fill all of the orders in the batch requiring that specific product.

Similarly, pick-and-pass is used when individual orders have to stop into multiple zones to fulfill the order and parallel pick is used when it is not desired for an order to pass from one picking zone to another or multiple picking zones. An example of parallel picking application is in food distribution where it is not desired that frozen goods picked be routed through the bakery products zone.

Hybrid picking methodologies – are also available to process orders in waves via individual picking processes based on efficiency.  The type of picking methodology for each order is chosen via order type analyis.

In Zone Labeling

Value Added Processes: (Configuration, Pricing Stickers, Repackaging)
Bastian can provide many value added processes downstream of the picking process.  Often these processes include special labeling, product configuration, and attachment of special peripheral devices to units. Likewise, repackaging is performed to take the quantity up or down to the number of units that are best suited for an end customer. For example a fifty pound carton of nails might be repackaged into five, ten pound cartons of nails because construction workers only want to carry a maximum of ten pounds when  roofing a house.