Pick-to-Carton

Pick-to-Carton Order Fulfillment

With today’s increased shipping volumes and smaller order sizes due to the continued growth of eCommerce, logistics professionals are analyzing their outbound flows for ways to ship more orders faster without adding labor costs. One of the best ways to achieve this is to optimize order picking.

What is Order Picking?

Order picking is an order fulfillment workflow in which products listed as order line items are retrieved from their respective warehouses. It is the first stage in fulfilling a customer’s order.[1]

Picking-to-carton is a proven solution to shorten and accelerate pick, pack, and ship processes in warehouse operations.

Simply put, picking to carton means that when the selectors pick the items for the order, they place them directly into the final shipping carton in which they are shipped.

How Picking-to-Carton Reduces Total Shipment Processing Time

In traditional fulfillment operations, workers do not pick to the final shipping carton. They typically put picked items into a reusable warehouse container or tote. Once the order is fully picked, the tote is moved to a packing station where the packer transfers the items from the tote to the final shipping carton and moves the package on to a shipping station for sealing and shipping labels.

The entire step of transferring order items from the tote can be eliminated by picking order items directly into the shipping carton.

Once the picker has completed the pick into the shipping carton, they can deliver it to the shipping station, where a worker simply seals it and adds the shipping label. Another time-saver is to have the packer seal the box and apply the shipping label to be ready for carrier pickup, eliminating the need to move the parcel to a shipping station.

In more automated warehouses, the picker can simply put the box on a conveyor where it is sealed, and a print-and-apply printer automatically applies the shipping label without human assistance.

Pick-to-Carton System Requirements

So why doesn’t everyone pick to carton, you may ask? This solution requires a fair bit of setup upstream to work. Most importantly, the process requires that item material master data and accurate dimensions are available in the system BEFORE the orders are picked to determine the correct shipping box size.

Cartonization software is also required to determine each order’s most space-efficient carton size. After all, shipping faster is not a significant advantage if the order is packed in a larger-than-necessary box and you pay to ship the item at the higher shipping rate that applies to a larger box.

Once these requirements are met, picking-to-carton reduces the time to ship each order resulting in more orders shipped faster. Picking-to-carton also reduces manual tasks and their associated labor costs.

You can further streamline the fulfillment process by integrating your multi-carrier shipping system with the ERP and WMS systems to automate carrier service selection for the lowest cost shipping based on required transit time.

Other Tips to Reduce Labor and Shipping Costs

Another cost-saving option is Blackbox shipping, which is described in our blog, “Warehouse Labor Shortage? How Blackbox shipping helps you ship more orders using less staff.” 

Learn More

Please contact us today if you are interested in learning more about picking to carton or other ways to reduce shipping costs in your warehouse.

Creative Logistics Solutions (CLS) has helped many customers reduce shipping and warehouse labor costs, eliminate manual warehouse tasks and automate their shipping process with our InfoShip/Vx multi-carrier shipping software solution. Please feel free to contact us for a quick chat if you have questions about picking-to-carton workflows.

[1] What is Order Picking? Zoho Business Guides, https://www.zoho.com/inventory/guides/picking.html