Zone picking

Each picker looks after one part of the warehouse and only picks what is stored there. An order moves from zone to zone, or every zone picks its share at the same time and the pieces are brought together afterwards. Nobody walks the whole building for one order. That way of working is called zone picking.

It pays off when the warehouse is big enough that walking is most of the work, or when zones need different skills or equipment, such as a chilled area, a heavy-goods area or a locked cage. The weak spot is the hand-over: someone has to bring an order's pieces together, and one slow zone holds everything up.

In a small warehouse with a few aisles it can add handling and waiting rather than save walking. Look at how far your pickers actually walk, and how many orders touch more than one zone, before you split the floor.