Once we’ve received a shipment order in the WMS, a warehouse worker needs to go and pick the goods for this order. And here we have two options:
The warehouse worker (or several workers) picks one order at a time. Pretty straightforward, right? You take a data collection terminal, go into the warehouse, and pick all the items for one specific order.
Pros: the simplest type of picking. Perfectly suited for small warehouses or large orders with many items.
Cons: if the orders are small (contain few items) but numerous, warehouse workers will spend a lot of time walking back and forth. They’ll often have to visit the same shelves multiple times a day and carry the same items repeatedly. This can significantly increase the amount of work required to complete picking.
Therefore, if you’re dealing with many small orders, it’s worth considering wave picking. It greatly optimizes walking distance and increases picking efficiency.
The warehouse worker (or a group of workers) picks multiple orders at once.
How does it work?
The WMS selects specific orders from the entire pool using a set of configurable filters — for example, by delivery service, the number of items in each order, and many other criteria. It then generates a combined list of items that need to be picked. We call this combined list a wave.
The more orders included in a wave, the less walking is required by the warehouse workers. They no longer need to visit the same aisles and shelves repeatedly to pick the same items for different orders.
Now, a single walk down an aisle is enough to gather goods for dozens — or even hundreds — of orders.
Pros: Significantly reduces walking time for workers and increases the speed of order picking.
Cons:
And this brings us to the next stage — sorting — which we’ll cover in the next section!
