Delivering faster order picking

For a growing number of wholesalers – whether they are focused on the B2B or B2C market – they are experiencing bottlenecks in their traditional fulfillment operations. There simply isn’t enough time for an order picker to take a trolley up and down past endless rows of racking so that the products can be picked, packed and dispatched quickly enough.

With the FramePick4Wholesale, the combination of smart and intuitive technologies virtually eliminates picking errors, plus intelligent order batching is said to enable a fourfold increase in the productivity of order pickers – and all without having to install a complex system of rigid conveyors or investing in other costly material handling equipment. 

At the heart of the system is the LR 35 vertical storage system. With two, four or six units connected in series, you can create highly compact storage of the inventory in standard plastic bins. Once an order line is released, the LR 35 rapidly presents the relevant storage bin to the operator. A user-friendly screen, which can be supported with a laser pointer if desired, informs the operator of how many products to pick and put in the customer order bins. 

Rather than the traditional conveyor-transport approach, customer bins are kept on order picking trolleys that are already common to many warehouses. The trolleys are placed in a frame fitted with put-to-light displays. As soon as the operator has picked the right quantity of products, the displays indicate how many must be put into which customer bin. Each ‘put’ is confirmed by pressing the button on the display, and then the operator moves on to the next order line. 

Once all the customer bins on a trolley are full, the displays on the frame light up. An operator can then simply transfer the trolley to the packing area where all the orders are packed ready for dispatch as normal. The next trolley waiting to be filled with customer orders can immediately be wheeled into the vacant space. When the operator uses the software to select the relevant number of customer orders, the software applies a predefined strategy to link them to the empty bins on the trolley. Then, a single scan is all it takes to connect the trolley to the frame and to add it to the current batch of orders being processed. 

The fast order fulfillment solution revolves around the LR 35, which Kardex believes is the fastest vertical storage system on the market. A single unit can retrieve 150 storage bins per hour. 

To put this in perspective, Kardex says that’s 50% more than the number of trays that a vertical shuttle system can present per hour. A combination of two LR 35 units enables a rate of 300 bins per hour. The number of picks per hour depends on the number of order lines that can be picked from a single bin. In the case of two LR 35 units, an operator can process up to 270 bins per hour. While the operator is picking products from a bin in the first unit, the second unit gets the next bin ready. 

Kardex Remstar supplies FramePick 4 Wholesale as a total solution including LR35 units, frames with put-to-light displays and Power Pick Global Smartpick 6000 software. Plastic bins, order picking trolleys, label printers and additional software modules are also optionally available. The total solution is offered with a complete service package which gives customers the peace of mind they need in fast order fulfillment. 

To learn more, download the company's white paper: www.kardex-remstar.co.uk