A number of companies are using a pouch system to process e-commerce orders.
The large growth in online orders has meant that many companies are looking for alternate systems to process orders. Many warehouse systems were set up to deal with orders that averaged tens of items. E-commerce orders are often for one or two items, and this has created a challenge of how to efficiently pick orders. Often, order items are situated at locations far from each other, giving pickers with warehouse trolleys long distances to travel.
The pouch system is one in which pouches travel on overhead rails. If an order has more than one item, a picker nearest each item puts them into a pouch, which is scanned. The pouches travel from the various warehouse locations to the packing station, where they are scanned and allocated to the individual orders.
Krish Nathan of SDI Systems, which sells pouch technology. says:
“Pouches are a super exciting technology that now actively tracks everything at the unit level.”
He claims that pouch systems are 100% accurate. Traditional systems that are 99.9% accurate, which may seem a high figure, but he points out that 99.9% accuracy in a warehouse that handles 20,000 items an hour means that 20 of these orders have errors – equivalent to one faulty order every two minutes.
Pouch systems may mean fewer warehouse trolleys are needed, but the warehouse equipment supplier is still needed to provide the warehouse racking, tables and other equipment the pouch system requires.
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