Replenish to Order - Fulfillment Best Practices (or should be)
It seems that in designing a fulfillment system that optimizes putaway, picking, weighing, labeling, and sorting would solve nearly everything. There are many companies that manufacture or simply integrate systems based on third party products.
One challenge that can cause a lot of inefficiency in zone picking (pickers only pick to orders that come into their zone) is how to address items not in the flow rack. It is usually prohibitive to stock ‘everything’ or likely it is impossible to keep all things in all picking zones. Most companies opt to keep only the fast movers or top 80% of fast movers in their pick zones. What about the slower movers or items that are not in the flow rack zones?
Rather than send pickers out on a ‘per order’ basis when a slow mover is part of an order, there can be a temporary zone or zones set up that address all items not in the flow rack. A single picker can batch pick all orders at once that include item(s) not in the pick zones. Once items are picked, they are scanned to one of the temporary zones and the order is automatically released to the system once all items in that order are available for zone picking.
CASI has coined the term “Replenish to Order” or “RTO” as part the fulfillment process to eliminate costly time it takes to retrieve slow movers one order at a time. If you have a 500k Sq Ft warehouse, you can imagine how many trips back and forth are saved by having these items picked all at once.
Here is a case study that focuses on a fulfillment system using RTO.
