Warehouse Tip of the Month: Location, Location, Location

If you have not done so, take an hour or two and simply observe the path that your warehouse employees walk every day while prekitting. With today’s technology, it’s easy to have them track the number of steps they walk.

If you are prekitting and using LightSpeed pay close attention to the location of the printers. Do they print the tote ticket at the location where the picking ends? Is the prekit staging close to where the tote ticket is printed?

Every step adds labor. While 8-10 feet may not seem like much, if you track it daily it may surprise you at how much time is wasted.

LightSpeed had an operator with a standard 48’ pick line. The first 32’ are snacks and candy and the last 16’ are drinks. The printer was located at the end of the line – which is the logical place. There were two people picking – one for snacks and one for drinks. The drink picker would start at the drink section of the line, walk past the end of the line to the high-volume drink area (on the back side of the drink line) to finish picking.

The snack person would start at the beginning of the pick line, stop at the 32’ mark which is where the snacks ended and then would walk 16’ to the end of the line to get the tote ticket. Then they would walk 16’ back to the tote which is where they staged the prekits.

The operator moved the printer 16’ to the end of the snack part of the line and saved 1.5 hours of labor a day.

Location, location, location. Spending a couple of hours observing the picking process and tracking steps could save you more labor that you realize.