The 2-Phase Picking
with
Dynamic Slotting Method

2-Phase Order Picking with Dynamic Slotting

This method is well suited to picking a batch of orders that have a reasonabe degree of commonality of SKUs, but because the SKUs are not well slotted, there remains a large distance between SKU locations that must be visited to fill many of the orders.  This phenomenum sometimes occurs in warehouses don't have a separate picking area, but rather pick from open cases in a large bulk storage area.

Some warehouse operations have so little time or labor available that slotting of products isn't possible.  Others have products whose picking frequencies change so often that slotting would have to be performed too often to be feasible.  Consequently, frequency of slotting is often performed no more often than quarterly for many companies. The FastFetch 2-Phase Picking with Dynamic Slotting Method enables automatic slotting of products in each order wave without relocating products or stopping picking operations! 

A good application would perhaps be filling store replenishment orders  based on Point-of-Sale data.  After the orders are waved by the WMS/ERP and sent to the FastFetch Optimizer PC, the FastFetch Optimizer PC sorts the line items in all orders by warehouse location.  Based upon the number of locations on each cart, the Optimizer PC then assigns a batch of contiguous locations (effectively  SKUs)  to each cart so that each cart will traverse a contiguous area of the picking area not traversed by any other cart.  Reference the diagram on this page as the explanation of the 2-Phase Dynamic Slotting Method is described below.

Phase 1 -  the SKU Gathering Phase
During Phase 1, a collection of very large carts will be dispatched to the picking area and when each picking location is reached, the picker will be instructed to pick a quantity of SKUs from that location sufficient to fill all orders in the wave requiring that SKU.  The same picking methods of voice, light directed and Bluetooth bar code scanning, as described in the Phase 1 of 2-Phase Pick/Put, are used to pick SKUs during Phase 1.  

Phase 2 - the Repicking Phase
After all SKUs have been picked during Phase 1, the large carts with solid SKUs in each location will lbe moved to an empty area of the warehouse and parked. The FastFetch PDA or Tablet PC on each cart will then send a command to its transceiver on the cart instructing the transceiver to become a controller so the cart will become a picking bay.  The entire set of these large carts will consequently constitute a small forward picking zone with SKUs perfectly slotted for the orders in the wave being processed.  A new set of order picking carts will be dispatched to this small forward picking area to fill orders using a traditional order picking process as described in 1-Phase Order Picking.  

Also see:  1-Phase Order Picking        2-Phase Pick/Put       Reverse Logistics