Picking is the most labour-intensive process in most warehouses, and the one most likely to go wrong. Every mispicked line creates a return, a credit note, a replacement shipment, and a customer who trusts you slightly less. Every extra minute spent walking, searching, or double-checking is capacity you are already paying for but cannot use.
The good news is that picking performance responds quickly to change. By tightening your processes, improving how stock is presented to your operators, and introducing automation where it earns its place, you can create significant improvements in both accuracy and throughput.
How to prevent picking errors in a warehouse
Most picking errors are caused by the process, not the person. Before you look at training or performance management, it is important to review the conditions your operators are working in. The most common causes of picking errors in a warehouse include:
- Similar items stored next to each other, with nothing at the pick face to tell them apart
- Faded, missing, or inconsistent location labels
- Paper pick lists that cannot be updated once they have been printed
- Long walking routes that encourage operators to rush or to pick from memory
- Stock put away in the wrong location, so the error is built in before picking starts
Prevention starts with discipline in your storage. Give every item one fixed, clearly identified location, separate visually similar products, and control put-away as tightly as picking. Then replace printed lists with digital instructions and confirm each pick with a barcode or RFID scan, so mistakes are caught at the pick face rather than by your customer.
The most effective step is to stop sending people to look for stock at all. Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems (ASRS) bring the required items to the operator at a fixed pick station, which removes searching, misreading locations, and picking from the wrong shelf. Because an ASRS links directly to your Warehouse Management System (WMS), stock movements are recorded as they happen.
How to improve picking accuracy in a warehouse
Preventing errors and improving accuracy overlap, but you have to measure accuracy before you can manage it. Track errors by line rather than by order, and break the data down by shift, by product group, and by pick location. Patterns appear quickly, and they usually point at a handful of items or a single area rather than at the workforce as a whole.
Once you know where the problems are occurring, light-directed picking is the fastest way to close the gap. The Kardex Power Pick System guides operators to the exact position and quantity in the tray, leaving nothing to interpretation.
Where operators are picking several orders at once, the Kardex Color Pick System assigns a colour to each order to keep them separate at the pick station. Used alongside automated storage, these systems help improve picking accuracy and inventory accuracy to up to 99%.
Two further controls are worth adding. Weight checking at the packing bench catches quantity errors before dispatch, and continuous cycle counting keeps recorded stock aligned with what is physically there, so pickers are not sent to empty locations.
How to increase picking speed
Speed comes from removing time that adds no value: walking, searching, waiting, and correcting. Practical ways to recover it include:
- Bringing goods to the operator instead of sending the operator to the goods
- Storing fast-moving lines in the ergonomic zone between hip and shoulder height
- Batch picking, so one trip serves several orders
- Sequencing items so they arrive in the order needed for packing
- Buffering completed orders until the carrier or production line calls for them
Automation makes the biggest single difference. The Kardex Shuttle and the Vertical Carousel Module Kardex Megamat deliver trays straight to an ergonomic access opening, while using the full height of your building rather than its floor area. For small parts at higher throughput, the Kardex Miniload-in-a-Box handles rapid buffering and sequencing, and an AutoStore solution suits dense storage and very high order volumes.
Faster picking and better accuracy go together
It is tempting to treat speed and accuracy as a trade-off, on the basis that careful picking must be slow picking. In practice they move together. The things that slow an operator down, such as searching for a location and checking the same line twice, are also the things that cause mistakes. Remove these bottlenecks and both metrics improve.
Start with the fundamentals: one location per item, reliable labelling, digital pick instructions, and scanned confirmation. Then look at where automation earns its place. At Kardex, we design storage and order fulfilment solutions around the way your operation works, so you can pick faster and more accurately without adding headcount.