Amazon is arguably one of the highest volume warehouse operations on earth. But certainly when it comes to warehouse efficiency, bigger doesn’t always mean better.
Just watch ~60 seconds of this clip (it should start playing around the 9:20 mark – some parts after 11:15 are NSFW!) from a recent episode of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”, where a seasonal Amazon employee shares how it was not unusual for him to walk 15 – 17 miles a day during a 10-hour shift:
Watching this clip made us feel even better than ever about the things we do for our customers because it illustrates one of the warehouse scourges that we battle daily: inefficient picking processes.
Now granted, we understand that Amazon is not your typical warehouse operation. We ourselves admit to sometimes having multiple Amazon orders arrive at our own homes – sometimes even in the same day. The volume of “one-off” single item orders they fulfill every day is hard to imagine.
But surely there’s a better way! Should one picker be directed to pick an item, then subsequently pick another one on the opposite side of the warehouse? Or make multiple repetitive trips to the same aisles and shelves?
With ScanForce Wave Picking (watch to learn more) and Directed Picking, our customers arguably have more efficient processes than Amazon.
Wave Picking lets you pick multiple orders in one pass, mapping out the most efficient path through the warehouse. With ScanForce Wave Picking, Amazon could aggregate all the open POs and create a picking order that is based on bin location rather than picking one order at a time and then taking another pass through the warehouse for the next order, and so on.
Contact us to learn more about Wave Picking and our many other tools that help Sage users achieve maximum warehouse efficiency!
