Pick Order Fulfillment: Winners and Heroes

The rapid rise of the online shopping trend has been fueled by six fundamental pillars: convenience, accessibility, variety, affordability, information, and a responsive order fulfillment industry.

With distribution centers shipping tens of thousands of orders per hour, its no wonder that it takes insurmountable effort and countless hours to deliver such mammoth quantities with speed, accuracy, and agility.

From the time customers click the ‘order now’ button, an army of workers scramble into place to process the orders, pull items from storage, prepare shipping boxes, pack, label, seal and send orders to shipping docks to ensure every product reaches its destination on time.

However, this is just an abridged account. The actual pick, pack and ship process is much more intricate.

For decades, distribution centers were largely equipped with pallet and full-case technologies to process caseloads of single line orders. However, with the normalization of digitized shopping, there is a huge growing interest in piece-picking systems, and why? They are ideal for high volume orders with low units per line.

One of the most fascinating pick technologies is the automated Pick-to-Tote A-FrameThe Pick-to-Tote A-Frame picks customer orders directly into cartons that are then conveyed to the next pick location and finally to the pack stations. It eliminates certain downstream processes such as the transfer areas, and anyone who has worked in a distribution center will appreciate that sort of efficiency.

It is undeniably the fastest pick technology in the industry, and that is far from hyperbole. Fulfilling orders at rates of up to 3,600 orders per hour is no mean feat. While it may sound equally incredulous, this technology is designed with mechanisms to ensure a 99 percent pick accuracy.

My first encounter with the totes-through A-Frame was at the warehouse of a third-party logistics (3PL) provider. The facility distributes a popular brand of beauty products found in most large supermarkets.

It was a mind-blowing experience observing the system’s autonomy and speed. It swiftly churns out numerous orders into moving cartons, all simultaneously and non-stop, with hardly any human labor. Well, just a handful of packers and product replenishers, but the actual pick process was 100% automated.

WHAT IS THE A-FRAME’S PICK PROCESS LIKE?

One limitation that I observed is the A-Frame’s product-specificity. It is designed to strictly pick SKUs of certain properties and order profiles. But most 3PLs, like my host, circumvent this by pairing it with complementary systems, mainly manual and the pick-to-light.

There are a few A-Frame vendors in the industry.

One of the most renown is the US-based?SI Systems?— also the only provider of the Pick-to-Tote (PTT) system.

There are also a few European providers such as Schaeffer and Inther Group, which solely provide the traditional Pick-to-Belt systems.

IS THE A-FRAME FOR EVERY PROJECT?

The A-Frame is not a cookie cutter solution. Vendors must analyze a buyer’s order profile, test the pickability of SKUs and consider the footprint available for operating the system to determine suitability.

With all that said, next time you click the ‘purchase now’ button, take a minute to appreciate the numerous moving parts and intelligence that goes into ensuring that your orders, plus that of 250+ million shoppers in the United States, are fulfilled and delivered with integrity.

While shoppers are the clear winners of e-tailing, the heroes are the warehouse operatives, the 3PLs and technology vendors who manage the logistics, transportation and distribution services that sustain the industry’s growth and boost the labor economy.