How to Avoid the Hidden Costs of Inaccurate Order Picking

Accurate and timely order fulfillment begins with effective order picking. When shipping delays or increasing customer returns occur, it’s often rooted in inaccurate or inefficient picking processes.

The consequences of one missed pick extend far beyond the cost of the item itself. Fixing a mistake typically involves refunding the original order, re-shipping the correct item, and incurring additional labor costs to resolve the issue. However, these expenses are minor compared to the long-term damage to your brand’s reputation that can result from mishandled customer orders.

To prevent these losses, you’ve got to examine the heart of your picking operation, particularly the shelving systems used to store and move inventory. Incorporating Flexmation’s Build2Light pick-to-light system can lead to a more organized, efficient, and transparent picking process, which significantly reduces errors and enhances throughput.

To see how pick-to-light can help, let’s take a closer look at how costly picking mistakes can be.

Hidden Costs Associated with Poor Order Picking

Order picking mistakes aren’t just minor errors – they can have massive financial consequences that negatively impact your business. Here’s how inaccurate order picking can manifest financial strain over time:

• Labor Inefficiencies: Order errors have to be fixed, which means that workers have to spend more time correcting errors instead of processing new orders.
• More Product Returns: When your workers make picking errors, your customers send inaccurate items back. More customer returns equal more shipping costs and reduced profits.
• Angry Customers: This point ties in directly to product returns. It’s what warehouse operators consider the most serious impact of poor order picking – losing customer trust. Sending customers the wrong item can cost you the repeat business and dedicated loyalty that even legacy clients give you.
• Mismanagement of Inventory: When picking and stocking errors are made, inventory miscounts are bound to happen. This problem usually leads to overstocking or stockouts.

Three Ways to Ensure Your Order Picking Initiatives Are Accurate

FIFO Storage for Accuracy

FIFO inventory management (first-in, first-out) is a hallmark of lean manufacturing and helps optimize flow and product storage issues in retail backrooms, warehouses, industrial spaces, and more. When you rotate inventory properly, old stock is less likely to be misplaced or overlooked.

How Pick-to-Light Systems Help: FlexMation’s Build2Light system helps boost picking efficiency and FIFO strategies with light displays that present the correct locations and quantities of your items. This helps ensure your workers use the right parts and tools at the right time.

Store Your SKUs Based on Throughput

When an order comes in, pickers should know the exact locations of each SKU. By establishing clearly defined SKU placements, confusion is minimized, and search time is reduced. Try organizing SKUs based on their throughput. By optimizing inventory slotting into categories of slow, medium, and fast movers, you can streamline the picking process and minimize the time workers spend traveling around the warehouse.

How Pick-to-Light Systems Help: Products like FlexMation’s Build2Light utilizes a system of indicator lights to highlight SKU numbers so that workers can identify them easier, leading to accelerated picking times.

Optimize Storage Layout and Reduce Travel Time for Pickers

Disorganized and cluttered storage areas set the stage for fulfillment errors. In a busy work environment, employees can only correct for chaos to a certain extent, and mistakes are bound to happen when they rush to pick items. By consolidating inventory into a neat and organized layout, it becomes significantly easier for workers to locate the right products when they need them.

How Pick-to-Light Systems Help: Lighting pick systems can drastically reduce errors made in hectic workspaces. Lights mounted on workstations, bin shelving, or other material storage media direct operators to the correct parts, quantities, and sequences to execute their tasks with greater accuracy than paper-based methods.

Streamline Your Order Picking with Help from FlexMation

At FlexMation, we aim to be trusted partners. Allies who advance your manufacturing performance. Simply put: We help you do your job better, safer, faster, and smarter. Whether you need error-proofing technology to reduce errors or you’ve got to order a FIFO rack quickly, we’re here to help you do your job better, safer, faster, and smarter. Contact our office today to learn more about how we can help with your lean manufacturing needs.