How to Be a Faster Warehouse Picker: 9 Tips for Success | Peoplevox
How to Be a Faster Warehouse Picker: 9 Tips for Success
Key takeaways
- Picking speed impacts customer satisfaction and on-time delivery.
- Warehouse layout, batch picking, and zoning can reduce walking time.
- A warehouse management system (WMS) with barcode scanning and guided picking boosts efficiency.
- Gamification and team visibility can increase motivation and output.
- Brands like Gymshark and AYBL Group have used these strategies to scale.
If you work in a warehouse for an ecommerce business, speed is everything. Delays and slow fulfilment times don’t just frustrate customers. They turn into an operational avalanche. One backlogged day becomes two, orders keep piling up, and suddenly you’re buried.
To make a measurable difference in pick speed, you need to reduce walking time, visual scanning, and mistakes. Here are nine tips for pickers and warehouse managers to help you pick faster and stay ahead of new orders.
Table of contents
- Stage high-demand products near shipping stations
- Batch pick multiple orders for the same item
- Divide your warehouse into zones
- Maximise your pickface with dynamic storage
- Separate similar-looking items
- Use a mobile WMS with clear instructions
- Pick and sort to trolley
- Gamify your picking
- Learn from the brands who’ve done it
- Warehouse efficiency FAQs
1. Stage high-demand products near shipping stations
If 50% of your sales come from 10% of your products, don’t store them at the back of the warehouse. Staging fast movers close to the packing bench minimises walking time and speeds up daily output.
Getting ready for a flash sale, influencer livestream, or ecommerce peak season event that could spike order volumes around certain products? Stage high-demand items on rolling carts or temporary shelving near pack and ship areas for quick access.
See more tips for efficient warehouse layout.
2. Batch pick multiple orders for the same item
If 100 people ordered the same hoodie, don’t walk the aisle 100 times. Pick all 100 in one go using a trolley with shelving and bins.
Batch picking by SKU eliminates redundant trips and significantly reduces walking time. Your WMS should be able to group like items automatically for batch picking.
Learn more about batch picking.
3. Divide your warehouse into zones
Instead of having every picker walk all over the warehouse, assign pickers to specific zones. This eliminates backtracking and pick path overlap. With zoning, five pickers can work in parallel without bumping into each other or duplicating steps.
It’s faster, safer, and easier to train new team members.
Learn more about zone picking.
4. Maximise your pickface with dynamic storage
Increase the number of products stored in ready-to-pick locations rather than in bulk storage. That way, you spend less time replenishing pick faces and more time fulfilling orders.
Dynamic or chaotic storage (where a SKU can be stored in multiple locations or multiple SKUs in one location) is the best way to do this. It’s possible with a barcode-based system and a WMS to track item location and guide pick routes.
Learn more about dynamic storage.
5. Separate similar-looking items
Managers, don’t make your pickers hunt between navy and black or medium and large items in the same bin. Instead, spread out lookalike SKUs across your storage locations, placing them next to items that look different.
If it’s the only blue thing on the shelf, your pickers can find it faster and with fewer errors. This is another example of dynamic storage in action. You can store SKUs in multiple locations, and pickers can easily find them using a mobile WMS.
6. Use a mobile WMS with clear instructions
Paper pick lists slow you down and invite mistakes. Upgrade to a WMS that uses mobile devices to guide pickers step-by-step.
Make sure the software is easy to follow, even for temps or new hires. Descartes Peoplevox’s Android app leads users with simple prompts and scan-to-confirm workflows.
7. Pick and sort to trolley
For multi-item orders, sorting as you pick speeds up the pick-pack-ship process. It doesn’t cost the pickers more time, and it makes your whole team more efficient.
Use a cart or trolley with labeled totes (one per order). As you pick, drop each item into its order tote. When the run is done, every order is already grouped and ready to pack.
8. Gamify your picking
Visibility drives motivation. Display live dashboards to show who’s picking fastest and who’s lagging behind. No one wants to be last, come the end of the day!
Set challenges, rewards, or team goals to encourage friendly competition and continuous improvement. Make it visible. Make it fun.
9. Learn from the brands who’ve done it
Stand-out brands like AYBL Group, Gymshark, Goodfair, and Aver once stood in the same spot, asking the same questions as you. They felt the pressure to pick orders faster to keep up with growing volumes and peaks without the warehouse falling over.
With Descartes Peoplevox WMS:
- Gymshark shipped 90,000 orders over Black Friday without delay.
- Goodfair cleared a 14,000-order backlog by going paperless.
- AYBL Group, Aver Active, and others all leveled up their picking rates with purpose-built workflows.
Warehouse efficiency FAQs
How do I increase warehouse picking speed?
- Reduce walking time by using batch picking, dynamic storage, and zoning, and digitize your workflows with barcode scanning and mobile guidance.
What is batch picking in a warehouse?
- Batch picking is when a picker collects the same item for multiple orders in a single run, rather than making multiple trips for each order. It’s faster and more efficient.
What tools help pickers move faster?
- Mobile scanners, guided picking apps, batch and zone workflows, and real-time dashboards all help pickers move faster with fewer mistakes.