Pick accuracy

Pick accuracy: the five fixes that lift it, in the order that pays.

A mispick is three costs: the credit, the redelivery and the customer who now checks every carton. Most warehouses chase accuracy with a scanner project. Five cheaper fixes come first, and the measure is the one most sites get wrong.

Start the health check What does DIFOT mean?

Or call Jayden on 0494 820 639, 7am to 5pm weekdays.

Quick answer

What lifts pick accuracy?

Measure it as errors per 1,000 lines from customer claims and returns, not screen confirmations, then five fixes in order: separate the look-alike products, confirm the location with a check digit rather than the item, label the bay rather than the stock, fix the pick path so it never doubles back, and weigh the carton at the pack bench. A scanner project comes after those five, confirming a process that works.

The measure

How should pick accuracy be measured?

Dispatch errors per 1,000 lines, counted from the customer's claim and the returns dock, not from the pick confirmation. A warehouse that confirms every pick on a screen can still send the wrong carton; the error is only real when the customer finds it. One week of claims and returns, sorted by cause, is the baseline. Causes: wrong item, wrong quantity, wrong customer, missing line, damaged, and the one nobody counts, right item in the wrong pack size.

Per 1,000 lines rather than per order, because a 50 line order and a 2 line order are not the same amount of work or risk, and a rate per line is the one that stays comparable as the order profile changes.

The five fixes

What are the five fixes that lift pick accuracy?

01Separate the look-alikesPull the claims for a week and most of them are two products that look the same, slotted next to each other. Move them apart. It costs a morning and it removes the biggest cause on most sites.
02Confirm the location, not the itemA pick list that says the item invites the picker to grab what looks right. A pick list that says the location, with a check digit on the bay, makes the picker go to the bay first. No scanner needed; a three digit label on the beam and a column on the list.
03Label the bay, not the stockStock labels move with the stock and get buried. A bay label with the product, the pack size and the check digit stays put and the replenisher fills to the label. Replenishment errors become pick errors a day later; fix them at the bay.
04One pick path, with the heavy and the fragile in the right orderA path that doubles back is a path where a picker skips a line and comes back later, which is where lines go missing. Heavy first so the carton is packed right, fragile last so it is on top. Draw the path on the floor plan and walk it.
05Weigh the carton at the pack benchA scale and the expected weight per line catch the wrong quantity before it leaves, for a few hundred dollars. It is the cheapest check in the building and the one that catches the error the other four miss.

After these five, a scanner project is worth doing, because it is now confirming a process that works rather than papering over one that does not.

Fix	What it costs	What it removes
Separate the look-alikes	A morning of forklift time	Usually the largest single cause on the claims list
Confirm the location, not the item	A check digit label on every bay and a column on the pick list	Grabbing what looks right from the wrong bay
Label the bay, not the stock	Bay labels with product, pack size and check digit	Replenishment errors that become pick errors a day later
One pick path, heavy first, fragile last	A re-sorted pick list	Doubling back, crushed cartons and the walk back to the bench
Weigh the carton at the pack bench	A scale and the expected weight per line	The wrong quantity, caught before it leaves

What it is worth

What is a mispick actually costing?

Count it for one week: the credit value, the redelivery cost (a second run at full price on the lane), the returns handling, and the time on the phone. Divide by the mispicks and you have a cost per error; multiply by the errors per 1,000 lines and the lines per year and you have the annual number. On most sites it is the most expensive single process failure in the building and the cheapest to fix, which is why it is one of the five counts in the health check and part of the perfect order mapping work.

Getting the number

One week of claims, sorted by cause.

Send the week and we read it back with the five fixes in the order that pays on your floor. Or start with the free ten minute health check and see where the warehouse sits across six areas.

Start the health check What does DIFOT mean?

Questions about pick accuracy

What is a good pick accuracy?

Count errors per 1,000 lines from customer claims and returns. There is no published Australian benchmark worth quoting; the honest baseline from your own claims matters more, and the five fixes on this page are the first things to do with it before any software is bought.

Do we need a scanner system to fix mispicks?

Not first. Separating look-alikes, confirming the location with a check digit, labelling the bay, fixing the pick path and weighing cartons at the bench come first and cost almost nothing. A scanner then confirms a process that works.

Why do we mispick when every pick is confirmed on screen?

Because the confirmation confirms what the picker believes, not what is in the carton. Look-alike products, stock in the wrong bay and quantity errors all pass a screen confirmation. The customer's claim is the only real measure.

Where do most mispicks come from?

Two look-alike products slotted together, stock replenished to the wrong bay, and quantity errors on multi-pack lines. A week of claims sorted by cause shows which one it is on your floor.

How do we measure it without a WMS?

A sheet at the returns dock and one at the credits desk: order, line, what was ordered, what arrived, cause. One week gives the baseline; per 1,000 lines picked keeps it comparable.

Can 360 run this for us?

Yes. It is part of the perfect order mapping and the operational review, priced on the consultancy page. Start with the health check to see whether process or warehouse is the weaker area.

Prefer to talk? Call Jayden on 0494 820 639. The order path from order to cash is on the perfect order mapping page.

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