Consolidated Picking in StoreFeeder

The Consolidated Picking feature is designed to greatly speed up the picking and packing process within your warehouse, allowing orders to be split across totes while picking.

This prevents orders from being picked twice, once when the products are being picked, and once when they are being packed. How the totes are organised depends on which despatch mode you choose, per pickwave or per order.

The method will vary greatly depending on how your warehouse operates and is laid out, and the locations of your products. Sometimes it will be quicker to pick by each pickwave, and sometimes by each individual order. 

Please note that activating this feature will affect the layout of your picking and packing lists, and will override any custom picking/packing lists for as long as this feature is switched on.

Additionally, consolidated picking will only affect pickwaves created after the feature is switched on, and will not affect pickwaves created previously.

To activate and set up consolidated picking, First navigate to ('Settings'>'Warehouse Manager'>'Despatch Mode') and you will be presented with the following settings:

For Consolidated Picking, the following are necessary:

Despatch Orders: Choose 'by pickwave' or 'by order'

Consolidated Picking: Turn this option 'On'.

Tote size: This is how many totes are on the trolley. Orders/pickwaves are spread evenly among the totes, so if you have 4 totes and 100 orders for example, each tote will receive 25 orders.

Next, you will need to navigate to ('Warehouse'>'Picking') and either create a new pickwave by selecting some outstanding orders, or choose the open pickwave you would like to pick and despatch.

For more information on creating pickwaves and despatching orders, see this knowledgebase: Creating a pickwave and despatching your orders

Now, when you select your 'Picking List' and click 'Print', your picking list will be arranged according to your chosen Despatch Mode. 

This picking list is designated by order. It shows which products should be placed in which totes as shown in the 'Totes (Qty)' column. This way, your pickers can collect as many of that product all at once and place them in the correct totes ready for packing.

In this example for SKU 547862, the picker goes to location A2 and picks 3 units. As per the 'Totes (Qty)' they then need to put 1 units into each of totes A, B and C.

From within your 'Open Pickwaves' in StoreFeeder, you can now select your 'Packing List' and click 'print'. Your packing list will be arranged per tote. As shown above, the products will already be in the correct totes (tote A and tote B) ready for packing: