WAVE PICKING in Warehouse

For a better way to ensure productivity in goods and services, especially to meet the demands of customers, the management team of a company often get tasked with the responsibility of setting up a system to compensate the loopholes that come up during business operations. In production, one of these is the strengthening of the warehouse management. This idea rooted chiefly in ensuring procedures known as the warehouse management system. It is important to mount all of these methods in order to reduce the headache due to pressure brought-in by competition between retailers and manufacturer.

With respect to the five management functions in this area, directing and controlling the movement of goods right from the assembly point can be crucial and needs a careful attention.

Looking into warehouse operations, this system is based on creating the function known as ‘Wave Pick and Load’ (WPL). The purpose for this setup is to ensure a constant flow of materials and goods from the warehouse to their various distribution centres efficiently. An important type is the waive picking.

Waves could be organized into similar stock keeping units (SKU’s), due to the common locations where the units are stored, deadlines for transportation, similar carriers or the sameness for grouping batches of work, which should flow through a warehouse management system or channel.

It is considered to be the fourth method for order picking. It combines both batch and zone picking. The first is called single order picking.

Although orders are grouped into batches, there is the need to reduce labour from loading of goods and maintaining multiple orders, as well as reducing movement of pickers to their respective destination. It further goes to reduce the cost of production significantly, whilst managing multiple orders at the same time.

At the warehouse point, there is usually sorting of items which must be carried and offloaded into various packing lots or bagging terminals for transportation.

When wave picking works best

It is an established fact that wave picking is believed to be the most efficient method since items get grouped already into their respective batches, before being carried or transported into their respective zone terminals for either processing or other usage. This is so important because one may choose not to put orders into their separate boxes or carriers.

Because goods are sorted out before waved away, the chances of tracking comes in easier, especially for counting purposes.

In addition, waiving ensures a higher number of goods to be released in high orders for the purposes of supply.

Again, waves allow a picker to have a reduced duration of time, which leads to more efficiency than the picking of orders one by another.

The other sides of using wave picking

In order to sort items with similar characteristics; wave picking could cause some problems. When items are waved into a single point of collection, it gets very much laborious in the course of sorting them into individual orders or groups. When this happens, goods may get messy, in other words, items grouped into zones can record errors.

Generally, it can be possible to undergo wave picking simultaneously, however in many instances, the workers together with their tools have to keep waiting, usually a wave gets completed before moving on to the next set. This collectively reduces the possibility of processing waves concurrently.

Besides, wave batches once established cannot be interrupted to allow picks of higher priority until a manual intervention is made. This easily leads to idleness in the process of workflow, although there should be a full execution of picking, packing and offloading of goods.

The warehouse management system is still an important tool in the quest to ensure an effective way of production, storage and distribution from the warehouse picking to their destinations.