Several studies show that out of all the warehouse processes, order picking accounts for the highest portion of operating costs, and according to a report from Georgia Tech, this portion can be as high as 63% of a warehouse’s total spending.
Picking error also is a top among other challenges that manufacturers must cost a lot of money and effort to deal with it.
What damage can it be when you send the wrong items for an order?
It will be you fail to lose customer satisfaction, trust, and demand, which is the worst scenario in business.
So, what causes picking errors?
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Unsuitable picking system
To choose the right picking method, a business must consider factors carefully namely:
- Scale of your business
+ The characteristics of the product being handled,
+ Total number of transactions,
+ Total number of orders,
+ Picks per order, quantity per pick, picks per SKU, total number of SKUs
Those are all factors that help us determine the method for order picking but often, companies cannot acknowledge the importance of the information and end up with a picking system like other companies but do not work for themselves.
This activity is still regulated by humans across industries. And the problem with laborers idle or unfocused working attitude or of performance downgrade over time are all bottleneck for many companies. And in the picking process, this adversity is not an exclusion.
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Wrongly labeled products
This is a less-happening problem compared to those two factors mentioned above but still one of the main contributions to the picking errors.
How to cure these problems?
Common methods manufacturers apply are through blaming individuals for their faults and making them promise not to cause the same mistake next time
Better ones are companies which collect error data and try to eliminate them in the future, but the fact that it is way too hard to eliminate problems caused by human neglect
That is why technology is moving forward to automation to deal with this problem from the bottom up.
AGVs – automated guided vehicles solution for reducing picking errors
How?
With the transformation of manufacturing production mode, mobile robots as an intelligent logistics equipment are being applied Intralogistics Process in various industries. Mobile robots can not only meet the logistics transfer needs of the entire logistics process, fixing long-standing difficulties typical like picking errors but also support flexible integration of different functional modules.
To learn about how a mobile robot’s (AGVs in particular) system work and how to set up one.
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