Picking errors are common at the best of times, but they can be a particular issue when it comes to recruiting new and inexperienced workers. With the current difficulties in filling warehouse roles, this is now a reality, and one that's hitting businesses hard at a time of high demand. These mistakes can cause inefficiencies that trickle down to customers and clients, delaying deliveries or leading to the wrong items being sent out. 

While the recruitment issues faced by warehousing and logistics businesses are multi-faceted, and require long-term solutions, there are ways to minimize picking errors. Some involve physical changes to the warehouse, and others are more about processes. Following are some tips on how to combine the two, and strike the perfect balance between efficient throughput and happy employees. 

Automation

Employees are only human, and humans make mistakes. Often they’re exacerbated by factors that can be controlled, such as workload, long hours and problems within the work environment. But some mistakes are innate and unavoidable, particularly with repetitive manual work. Anyone doing broadly the same thing for a long period of time is liable to see their concentration slip at some point, and make a picking error.

Computers don't lack for concentration. While they can make mistakes, these are generally problems resulting from human error, such as bugs in the code, or problems interacting with an environment that sits outside of what they've been programmed for. Within the correct parameters, a computer can potentially perform rote tasks both more quickly than humans and with greater accuracy — all while avoiding the need for breaks.

Warehouse automation is making this sci-fi concept a reality. Robots and autonomous vehicles can now fetch and deposit pallets, pick items and package them for delivery with minimal oversight, all while working in tandem with an advanced warehouse management system. What's more, these robots are increasingly available for rental through robots-as-a-service (RaaS) companies, reducing the barriers to entry for smaller firms. If you're struggling to recruit warehouse operatives, robots could be the answer. 

Different Racking Formats

Warehouse racking is often all installed at the same time, with relatively little thought about exactly what will be stored in it. This view of racking as multi-purpose means that it often stays in place for many years, fulfilling many different functions. Plenty of attention is paid to how safe it is and its continued maintenance, but there’s often less focus on whether it’s doing its job as efficiently as it could be.

The reality is that some racking formats are not ideally suited to whatever they’re storing, leading to awkwardly fitted pallets, empty spaces or items being in a less-than-ideal location for picking. This can make it harder or simply more time consuming to find and access certain goods, with the knock-on effect of discouraging workers from putting in the effort needed to correctly identify and retrieve items.

By reconfiguring your pallet racking in line with current and anticipated inventory, you can increase the efficiency and ergonomics of picking and storage. Formats such as gravity flow racking, multi-tier racking and pallet shuttle racking can simplify access and retrieval for both people and vehicles, reducing the stress and complexity of picking, and making some items easier to locate.

Reassessing Your Strategies

Warehouses are by definition extremely changeable environments, with constant incomings and outgoings, and seasonal shifts in supply and demand. As such, it pays to review your strategies regularly to ensure that they’re serving your workforce, and not working to exacerbate picking errors. Simple changes to the way you and your operatives work could have a drastic impact on both picking errors and productivity.

Consider, for instance, whether your most popular stock is easily accessible, and whether it’s close to your packing and shipping areas. The farther away and more awkward the stock is to reach, the more liberties will be taken when picking it, and the more prone operatives may be to mistakes. Also, look at how you’re storing similar or identical items, and whether this might be causing confusion, even if it seems to make logical sense.

One example is having multiple pallets of the same item in different locations, in order to provide more picking faces near different packing locations. This might seem to make operational sense, but unless you keep a close eye on your inventory, operatives could end up moving between these areas to pick multiple copies of the same item, lowering efficiency and increasing the potential for mistakes. The same can be said of storing different items in the same bin or pallet, which has obvious potential for errors.

Labelling and Signposting 

The high-pressure, fast turnover environment of a warehouse often means that picking an item is a rote process. Operatives use the cues they need to find the item they need, pick it, and move on. Where labelling complicates this process, there often isn’t time to correct things or investigate further, so it gets assumed that the item that’s in a certain place or has a certain label is the correct one. This is how most picking errors happen.

Labeling and signposting are two processes that are key to the organization of a warehouse. Failing to maintain either causes issues that quickly snowball. One mistake in where a pallet or items should be deposited can cause a chain reaction when the thing that was meant to be there arrives, and gets placed somewhere else. Getting labeling and signposting right — and ensuring that it stays that way — is the foundation of good warehouse management.

Clear, consistent signage should be displayed where it’s easily visible to help pickers, from obvious aisle markers to up-to-date rack labels. A variety of technologies can also be used to ensure greater accuracy, from simple barcode scanners to modern sensors, and even live mapping on a mobile or augmented reality device. Labels should also be distinctive, so as to avoid confusion over similar products, and regularly checked to ensure that old labels aren’t still in place, and haven’t been damaged or fallen off racks.

Picking errors often come down to simple facts of human attention spans, and the capacity for mistakes to happen under pressure. As a typical warehouse doesn’t allow for the alleviation of this pressure — or, at least, time pressure — it instead falls on warehouse operators to make operational changes. By altering things like the warehouse design, racking and labeling, you can make your employees' lives easier, and improve efficiency in the process.

James Beale is operations manager at Invicta Racking.