Dynamic Put Walls

Summary of Innovation

Put Walls have become popular in recent years to reduce walking distance or to enable consolidation of picked products from multiple zones in a DC. Unfortunately, a drawback of put walls is that products must be touched 3 times: once when picking, once when scanning and putting and once when packing from the put wall slot. FastFetch has developed a Dynamic Put Wall system that retains the advantages of put walls while reducing the number of touches by more than half.
Most companies follow the 80/20 rule for product distribution in which 80% of products ordered come from 20% of the products available (i.e. popular or high velocity products). Accordingly, 20% of the popular products are slotted relatively close together to reduce walking distance and time. The FastFetch Dynamic Put Wall system uses “C” order picking carts, loaded with order shipping containers, to batch pick products from the 20% slotted area. At the conclusion of this picking operation, about 80% of the required products are in the shipping containers on the order carts.
Concurrent with this order picking process, “B” bulk picking carts, each with “C” totes, are dispatched to the unslotted, slow moving products area that has been divided into “B” partitions to pick the remaining 20% items missing from the orders on the “C” order picking carts. Since each bulk picking cart traverses through a separate partition, they collectively traverse the larger unslotted area only once, thus minimizing walking distance and time.
The hardware on the order carts (containing shipping containers) is then digitally transformed by software on the cart tablets, so that the carts become put walls. Each bulk picking cart then unloads, next to each put wall (formerly an order cart), a tote associated with the specific put wall. Products in each tote are then scanned and lights on put wall slot (or slots) are illuminated indicating where the products should be placed. When an order slot has all the items required for the order the word “????” is illuminated in the adjacent light adjacent to the slot so the order container can be removed and taken to shipping.
Using FastFetch Dynamic Put Walls, walking time is minimized and 80% of the products are picked from the slotted area and touched only once. Furthermore 20% of the products are touched twice (rather than three times); once when picked in bulk and once when scanned and placed into a put wall order slot. Consequently, the total touches for “I” items is reduced by 53.3%.

Innovation Statement

Dynamic Put Walls use software on cart tablets to digitally transform light directed picking hardware on carts to function as put walls.

Applicability

The innovation makes fulfilling ecommerce orders from a large picking much more efficient cutting the number of touches by more than 53%.

Posted Date	12/12/19
Contact	John C (Jack) Peck
Contact Email	peck[at]fastfetch.biz
Category	Best IT Innovation

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