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There is a continued fear of robotic warehouse automation and its ability to take warehouse jobs from employees. While we understand the fear, we don’t necessarily share it.

It’s true that 20% of products in a facility are picked 80% of the time. This means that keeping the most frequently picked items in a convenient location is a no-brainer right?

Order picking methods are defined in terms of: (a) pickers per order - the number of pickers that work on a single order at one time; (b) lines per pick - the number of orders a single item is picked for at one time; and (c) periods per shift - the frequency of order scheduling during one shift.

Last year retailers everywhere in every niche, B2B and B2C, had to either learn how to do Ecommerce and In-Store Fulfillment for the first time or learn to do it much better on a bigger scale than ever before. What businesses did to engage with customers on the front end – evolving their offerings into a multichannel or omnichannel presence – was not always matched by the evolution required in the back end for fulfillment.

Wasted Motion does not happen all at one time - it may be 20 seconds here and 10 seconds there, making it extremely difficult to identify.  Simple examples of wasted motion include:

• Walking to a printer to print labels
• Walking to a computer to access data 
• Walking to a static desk to dimension product

Not only is this waste hard to identify, it's also very costly over the course of a year.

It's a common challenge during peak Holiday season. Every year, thousands for warehouses across the world ramp up for an explosion of shipping that challenges even the most sophisticated warehouse managers. By some estimates, Catalog and E-Commerce businesses generate nearly 60% of their annual sales in the last four months of the calendar alone.

One common "challenge," which might be considered a "good problem to have" is the "hit product" where there are hundreds or even thousands of orders every day for a single product that everyone wants...or wants to give as a gift. When there are so many single-item orders for the same item like this, it seems wasteful to run all of them through the standard picking, sorting and packing process that a typical order would go through.

"Measured in time and money - order picking is without doubt the most costly activity in a typical warehouse. It is also the activity that plays the biggest role for customer satisfaction with the warehouse – and in the final analysis the entire supply chain." - Professor René de Koster

1. “Why not make the work easier and more interesting so that people do not have to sweat?  The Toyota style is not to create results by working hard. It is a system that says there is no limit to people’s creativity.  People don’t go to Toyota to ‘work’ they go there to ‘think’” – Taiichi Ohno

2. “The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.” – Shigeo Shingo

3. "Many good American companies have respect for individuals, and practice Kaizen and other TPS {Toyota Production System} tools.  But what is important is having all of the elements together as a system.  It must be practiced every day in a very consistent manner–not in spurts–in a concrete way on the shop floor."  - Fujio Cho, President, Toyota Motor Corporatio